Geography
At OLOC Primary School, we are proud to nurture a community of young geographers!
Our goal is to inspire a love for geography in our students, encouraging them to dream big and consider futures as cartographers, town planners, conservationists, or weather forecasters.
Through our geography curriculum, we aim to provide a meaningful platform for students to explore, appreciate, and understand the world and its evolution. We strive to help pupils examine the relationship between the Earth and its inhabitants by studying place, space, and environment.
Our geography program equips students with the skills to grasp locational knowledge and understand how people fit into the broader context of the world. We are committed to fostering a deep connection to our local community and beyond through engaging practical experiences and fieldwork activities.
‘You can travel the seas, poles and deserts and see nothing. To really understand the world, you need to get under the skin of the people and places. In other words, learn about geography. I can’t imagine a subject more relevant in schools.’
Michael Palin
Implementation
A guiding principle of CUSP Geography is that each study draws upon prior learning. High volume and deliberate practice is essential for pupils to remember and retrieve substantive knowledge and use their disciplinary knowledge to explain and articulate what they know. This means pupils make conscious connections and think hard, using what they know.
CUSP Geography is built around the principles of cumulative knowledge focusing on spaces, places, scale, human and physical processes with an emphasis on how content is connected and relational knowledge acquired. An example of this is the identification of continents, such as Europe, and its relationship to the location of the UK.
What do we teach?
Early Years
In the Early Years Foundation Stage, our curriculum supports children’s understanding of geography, people, and communities through the 'Understanding the World' component.
Children explore their immediate environment, including school, home, and the local area, through firsthand experiences. They learn about different environments through books, stories, poems, small world play, role play, and visits. Our regular trips to local places such as the church, park, and shops provide valuable experiences. Children are encouraged to discuss, comment on, and ask questions about what they observe, fostering active learning and exploration of their interests.
Key Stage 1
In Key Stage 1, our curriculum helps children develop a sense of place, scale, and an understanding of human and physical geographical features.
Later in Key Stage 1, map skills and fieldwork become essential, helping children explain and describe places, the people who live there, and the spatial and scale relationships. Initially, children learn the orientation of the world by studying the seven continents and five oceans. They then extend their knowledge to the countries and capital cities of the United Kingdom, and the surrounding oceans and seas, making use of routes and maps within their school grounds and classrooms.
Throughout Key Stage 1, pupils enhance their locational knowledge by studying and identifying human and physical features of diverse locations around the world. The chosen locations are deliberately culturally diverse.
Fieldwork and map skills are further developed through the study of the local area, using the cardinal points of a compass. Maps are introduced through familiar stories to communicate the characteristics of places and spaces. Pupils apply their knowledge of human and physical features in their local context. OS maps are introduced using Digimap for Schools, where pupils identify and map simple keys and features locally to begin understanding place, distance, and scale.
LOWER KEY STAGE 2
As pupils enter Lower Key Stage 2, they revisit fieldwork and map skills, with the introduction of intercardinal points to build on their knowledge of cardinal points. This supports an in-depth study of the UK, focusing on regions, counties, landmarks, and topography. Students also engage in detailed fieldwork and map skills, emphasising the use of OS maps.
Their understanding of human and physical features expands as they study rivers. Pupils learn to accurately locate places around the globe by studying absolute positioning systems, including latitude and longitude.
To complement their studies on location and position, pupils focus on the water cycle, which helps explain physical processes and the specific features of different biomes in various global locations. They examine geographical patterns across the world using latitude to understand why places have particular characteristics. Further river studies involve substantive knowledge applied to the River Nile and the Amazon River.
Additional fieldwork and map skills are introduced to enhance pupils' understanding of locations and places. A carefully planned study of the environmental regions of Europe, Russia, and North and South America highlights climate regions, enriching their geographical knowledge.
UPPER KEY STAGE 2
The study of Biomes and Environmental regions builds upon world locations, latitude and longitude studies. World countries and major cities are located, identified and remembered through deliberate and retrieval practice, such as low stakes quizzing and Two things tasks. The study of biomes is revisited deliberately to ensure the content is remembered and applied.
In upper KS2, the study of 4 and 6 figure grid references supports prior learning of reference systems and brings an increased accuracy to mapping and fieldwork skills.
Pupils take part in geographical analysis using patterns and comparison of both human and physical processes as well as the features present in chosen locations. This abstract concept is made concrete through studying and comparing the Lake District, the Tatra mountains of Poland and the Blue mountains of Jamaica. Physical processes such as orogeny and glaciation are acquired to explain significant change over long periods of time. The concept of physical process is revisited through a study of Earthquakes, mountains and volcanoes.
Settlement, trade and economic activities are the focus of a study that draws upon the Windrush generation module in CUSP History. This develops an increasing knowledge about migration and the factors that push people away or draw people towards settlements. Within these studies, pupils make relational connections between settlements and physical or human features.
How do pupils learn
A key aspect of CUSP lessons is our systematic and coherent approach, structured around six distinct phases of a lesson. These are used numerous times throughout the lesson as learning is ‘chunked’ into small manageable steps.
KNOWLEDGE ORGANISERS
Dual-coded knowledge organisers provide core information, making it easy for children to access and use them as a reference and for retrieval practice.
KNOWLEDGE NOTES
Knowledge notes expand on the core information found in knowledge organisers. They help focus pupils' working memory on the key question that will be asked at the end of the lesson, reducing cognitive load and avoiding the split-attention effect.
MAPPING OF KNOWLEDGE
The sequence of learning makes clear essential and desirable knowledge, key questions and task suggestions for each lesson and suggested cumulative quizzing questions.
IMPACT
Our curriculum design ensures progress over time across key stages, tailored to each child's starting point and skill development. Our Geography curriculum will inspire pupils to become enthusiastic learners, as evidenced by their work and their voices.
Year 3 Example Work
Year 4 Example Work
Year 5 Example Work
Year 6 Example Work
