History

Intent

To build inquisitive historians who understand how the past influences the present and the future.

Implementation

The drive behind the teaching of history at Earl Soham is to ensure that the children develop an understanding of the way in which world events, past and present, link together. They are guided to see the cause and effect of historical events and identify patterns and links between cultures. Children are always encouraged to question why, and to think of themselves as detectives when searching through evidence in order to find out about what has happened in the past. An understanding of types of historical sources and how to interpret them is taught from the beginning of KS 2. Discussions prompted by world events and current affairs are encouraged and inspire pieces of work driven by the children.

 For example, pupils made models of World War One trenches as part of our museum display and these are shown below. We wrote non chronological reports, dairy entries home  from a soldiers view point and children bought in items from their own family histories.

Chronology

An understanding of chronology is taught from reception with the subjects being re -visted every term, with every new topic. While there is a strong emphasis on teaching chronology, we do not teach the whole syllabus chronologically due to the way our termly topics fall throughout our four year rolling programme. 

However, a large part of the syllabus runs chronologically and teachers refer to class timelines and draw links between events from similar time periods across all subjects, including science, English and geography.

Wherever possible, the history theme is linked with other subjects including art, DT, geography, English and PSHE. When studying the Ancient Mayans we made masks, we turned our classroom into a world war museum full or primary and secondary historical sources and we mummified a tomato to understand the process the Ancient Egyptian’s used.

Want to help at home?

Why not take a look at the knowledge organisers ? These share all the knowledge taught over the course of each topic. They are really useful to talk through, quiz on or generate more questions to research.