“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. We’d all be lost without it.”  

Michael Palin 

Geography at Warden House Primary School is a valued part of the curriculum, providing a purposeful means for exploring, appreciating and understanding the world in which we live; how it has evolved and how it continues to evolve. Geography explores the relationship between the Earth and its people through the study of place, space and environment.

In Geography, pupils learn the skills of understanding a locality and how and where people fit into its overall structure. Geography encourages children to learn through experience, particularly through practical activities and enquiry.

The geography curriculum at Warden House is constructed and designed to inspire the children’s curiosity and fascination about the world around them and the people and cultures within it. To ensure that the children know more and remember more, links have been made between geography units, curriculum subjects and across year groups to ensure that learning is revisited and built upon in a manner that is meaningful for the children here at Warden House. The sequence and structure of learning has been organised with careful consideration of cognitive load and with embedded retrieval practices to deepen the children’s knowledge and understanding over time. By blocking units and integrating an enquiry-led approach to our geography teaching and learning, we aim to ensure that the children widen their knowledge and understanding of the world; increase their subject vocabulary; develop curiosity and heightened critical thinking skills and understand that they have a role to play in the future of our planet as a responsible global citizen. 

At Warden House, the children work to develop the skills needed to understand the world around them, ask questions and are challenged, through enquiries, to develop a deeper knowledge and understanding of the wider world; geographical issues which the world faces and their role within the world as it is today and for the future.  

Each unit includes a balance of knowledge and enquiry, developing the children’s skills progressively throughout the school. The enquiry elements of the units for each year group enable the children to ask questions and explore concepts and geographical issues more deeply showing a greater understanding of the relationship between humans and the world around them. Over time, the children will learn more and remember more.