At Hauxton we believe that knowledge is key to understanding the world outside of school, to be critical thinkers and to understand other cultures, beliefs and backgrounds.
In order to assure that our curriculum is high quality and meaningful for our children, we are following the Opening Worlds Curriculum, written in association with the Haringey Education Partnership. The units of study are from years 3 - 6.
Units of study in Key Stage One primarily units that build our understanding of the world from starting with where we are and the places we know around us, through to understanding how that relates to England as a country, the country within the United Kingdom and where Hauxton is in relation to the rest of the world - and how other places in the world are different in both natural and human geography.
"In the past there was a land bridge called Doggerland that connected Great Britain to Europe and Geography helped me know where that was."
year 2 child, 2022
We believe that there needs to be a balance between knowledge and skills-based learning. One can not apply the disciplinary aspects of Geography without first having knowledge - and one can't extrapolote new knowledge or theories without having learned the disciplinary skills. We refer to these as substansive content and disciplinary content.
Substansive Content is the information and knowledge that we learn in a lesson - stories, accounts, reports, source material - and the vocabulary that enable to the children to move within their knowledge through reading, writing and discussion.
"[Geography has helped me] in English and other lessons. It's taught me new words."
Year 4 child, 2022
"When we speak about biomes, we link it to weather personifications and when we write about a setting, it's easier because we know what the weather could be like there"
Year 6 child, 2022, explaining how geography has benefitted her story writing
Disciplinary Content is learning about how knowledge of the world is constantly renewed outside of school by geographers, meteorologists, geologists, and teachers the children that our knowledge is not fixed - there's always more things to discover and that these new discoveries may shift our understanding or put our knowledge into a different context.
"Geography helped me learn in history because I knew where the countries were that we were talking about"
year 1 child, 2022
"I understand biomes better - it's about weather which I did in Key Stage 1"
year 5 child, 2022