Why do we teach history?

At Madginford Primary School, we want children to show curiosity & excitement as they uncover the stories of the past.

We want children to act as detectives, exploring the evidence left behind to reconstruct events & find out about everyday life in the past. They will have the opportunity to study various periods, using key concepts to make comparisons, identify similarities & differences as they go. Children show they can persevere, recognising when they might need to find more evidence before they can come to, & share their own conclusions about what has happened.

Children will have the chance to study a range of people, civilisations, significant events & places from around the world, demonstrating empathy, respect for the different cultures encountered & making links to their own lives.

How do we teach history?

Chronology
Chronology is the understanding of when events happened, and how they relate to one another. We use timelines throughout the school in order to build on what children have learnt before, identify what came before the period being studied as well as what came after. This helps to develop a sense of cause and effect, an understanding of how much time has passed and also the awareness that different civilisations or cultures could exist at the same time in different places (for example, the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans overlap chronologically, but existed in different parts of the world).
Semantic Concepts
Semantic concepts are key concepts that flow through history and can be used to make links between the periods studied. At Madginford, we use four such concepts in our planning:

•  Invasion and conflict
• Democracy and rule
• Innovation and Technology
• Community and society

Each History topic is assigned a key semantic concept, allowing the children to focus their learning on one area of the period being studied and to make links with other periods.

Disciplinary concepts
Disciplinary concepts are the tools a historian uses to learn about the past, using primary and secondary sources as well as an understanding of cause and effect to pick apart events in the past.
At Madginford, we design our curriculum to give children the best possible chance to develop these skills that can then be applied to the study of any period.

There are also a number of ‘big ideas’ that we meet in every history topic: similarity & differences; causes & consequences; continuity, change and significance. Children become increasingly skilled at remembering, understanding & explaining these skills & ideas on their journey through the school.

Our curriculum is flexible as we will adapt our planned topics to allow time to explore & learn about significant events, both local and national, that happen throughout the year.