Crestwood Park - History

Our School Our Curriculum & Our Classes Our Curriculum

Our History Curriculum Vision

At Crestwood Park, we want our children to leave us as historians. We aim to teach children the skills that they need to discover historical facts and perspectives for themselves. We have designed our history curriculum to:

Engage our children so that they want to know more and investigate
Make them active participants in the subject
Probe and challenge children's thinking
Encourage children to question and think critically
Be learner driven
Promote curiosity, imagination and independence
Use high quality sources to enable children to draw their own conclusions

The skills we teach our children have a range of applications in historical study and beyond. The historians that leave Crestwood Park may go on to work in the media. They may become solicitors, journalists, teachers, librarians or research assistants. There are many roads that historical skills can lead our children to.

We will teach our children these skills by ensuring that they drive their own learning. We will not provide children with the answers but will teach the skills of historical inquiry to allow children to find the answers themselves. We use a variety of high quality historical sources, which increase in complexity. Children are then taught to recognise, compare and contrast, summarise, explain, justify and critique in order to develop informed conclusions.

Our curriculum increases children's confidence by showing them that they can work independently to reach conclusions. Critical thinking is a pertinent skill in a world of social media and 'fake news'. Our children do not accept the obvious, but gain perspective on facts and presented truths. Our curriculum increases challenge as children move through the school, by ensuring a progression in historical skills. We measure the impact of our curriculum through scrutiny of work produced and pupil interviews. This provides the opportunity to identify skills that children have not yet mastered, so that they can be revisited.

We use the 'Connected History' scheme to teach history. We use key questions to drive children's learning and use the high quality sources they provide to help children to answer these questions.

Through our history curriculum, we aim for children to commit knowledge to their long-term memories. We use assessment strategies to determine how successful this is and to allocate additional support as necessary. We use low-stakes assessment strategies, quizzing and targeted questioning to assess pupils' knowledge and understanding. We use flashbacks to revisit prior learning. We teach responsively to address misconceptions in the moment.

At Crestwood Park, we want all of our children to experience a broad and balanced curriculum. All children, including those with SEND, will experience the same learning opportunities and high expectations. Our history gems (learning outcomes) are sometimes explored differently to enable children to succeed. Learning might be scaffolded and supported to help children achieve these outcomes. Scaffolded activities provide pupils with extra resources, such as visual prompts, to reach the same learning goals as the rest of the class. Resources might be presented in different ways to make the learning more accessible to some children.

Each class studies history in the autumn term. We also conduct a whole school local area study in the summer. This explores the history and geography of our local area. We use celebration days at the close of these terms to showcase what we have studied.