History at Hauxton

The broader the knowledge, the easier it is to make sense of the world.

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, with two summer units in Owls class in year A of our two-year programme. Reception, year 1 and year 2 are primarily units of study around signifant people, inventions and periods of time.

"How they made fire in the Stone Age is different to when the Fire of London happened"

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 History 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. 

"It's helped me with my writing. I have an expanded vocabulary!"

Year 5 child, 2022

Disciplinary Content is learning about how knowledge of the past is constantly renewed outside of school by historians 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. 

"History and Geography are linked because it includes information from Geography. Geography teaches about resources and in history we learn how they're used"

 year 3 child, 2022