We are Historians!

We want our children to love history. We want them to have no limits to what their ambitions are and grow up wanting to be archivists, museum curators, archaeologists or research analysts. Our aim is that, through the teaching of History, we stimulate all children’s interest and understanding about the life of people who lived in the past.

As historians at Distington Community School, we aim for our children to leave with:

• An excellent knowledge and understanding of people, events, and contexts from a range of historical periods and of historical concepts and processes.
• The ability to think critically about history and communicate ideas very confidently in styles appropriate to a range of audiences.
• The ability to support, evaluate and challenge their own and others’ views using accurate historical evidence derived from a range of sources.
• The ability to think, reflect, debate, discuss and evaluate the past, formulating and refining questions and lines of enquiry.
• A passion for history and an enthusiastic engagement in learning, which develops their sense of curiosity about the past and their understanding of how and why people interpret the past in different ways.
• A respect for historical evidence and the ability to make robust and critical use of it to support their explanations and judgments.
• A desire to embrace challenging activities, including opportunities to undertake high-quality research across a range of history topics.

At DCS, we follow the Learning Challenge Curriculum (a cross-curricular question-based approach to learning.) This is a knowledge and skills-based curriculum. 

Our Progression of skills and knowledge shows the skills taught within each year group and how these develop to ensure that attainment targets are securely met by the end of each key stage.

Children are given a knowledge organiser at the start of each unit which details some key information/images, key questions and vocabulary. This is not used as part of an assessment, but to support children with their acquisition of knowledge and are used as a reference document. 

History is taught explicitly once a term (3 units per academic year).

Our Curriculum Map documents shows which topic is being taught when.

History at Distington Community School

Topics are blocked to allow children to focus on developing their knowledge and skills, studying each topic in depth. We have developed a progression of skills with each year group, which enables pupils to build on and develop their skills each year.

In KS1, History begins by looking at the children’s own personal history and introduces them to the idea of chronology and timelines. In KS1, History will look at significant events and people who have shaped society, locally, nationally and globally.

In KS2, history is taught chronologically to allow children to confidently place each time period. This allows pupils to consistently build on previous knowledge and learning by placing previously taught History topics on a timeline. Each year group across KS2 focus on a period of ancient history, a topic related to settlers and invaders in Britain and an aspect of British history beyond 1066. In addition, children will also explore local history. (See curriculum maps for curriculum organisation.)

In order to support children in their ability to know more and remember more, there are regular opportunities to review the learning that has taken place in previous topics as well as previous lessons. At the start of each topic children will review previous learning and will have the opportunity to share what they already know about a current topic. Children are given opportunities, where possible, to study artefacts leading to enquiry, investigation, analysis, interpretation, evaluation and presentation. We plan for effective use of educational visits and visitors, to enrich and enhance the pupil’s learning experience and the History curriculum. Teachers use highly effective Assessment for Learning at different points in each lesson to ensure misconceptions are highlighted and addressed. Effective modelling by teachers ensures that children are able to achieve their learning intentions, with misconceptions addressed within it.

How is History assessed at DCS?

We measure the impact of our curriculum through checkpoints using the following methods:

• Checkpoint 1 - At the start of each unit, children record in their books what they already know and what they would like to find out.
• Checkpoint 2 - Review of previous learning at the beginning of each lesson.
• Checkpoint 3 - End of unit quiz of key knowledge. These are recorded in our books.
• Checkpoint 4 – Continuing review of previous learning weeks later to check ‘sticky knowledge’
• Checkpoint 5 – Pupil voice and book study

How do we know about The Great Fire?

We took part in a mock excavation/archaeological dig. We explored the work of archaeologists and how they help us to find out about the past before excavating / digging up / ‘unearthing’ a range of other historical sources that can also tell us about the past. We examined these in close details in our group to collate as much information as we could about The Great Fire whilst asking and answering simple questions about old and new.

Cave drawing/painting.

As an introduction (hook) to our topic looking at the Stone Age we have begun to explore some examples of cave drawings/paintings discovered from this period in history. We identified some of the animals and themes included in these and explored the colours that were used. The children then created some of their own cave drawings collaboratively on a large piece of brown paper using oil pastels, this has been used to create the background to our class displays.