History

History the Seahouses Way 

To cultivate an enthusiasm for lifelong learning through a curriculum which reflects our rural and coastal context, adapting to the needs of our children- locally, nationally and globally.

At Seahouses Primary we develop and build upon our children’s historical knowledge, skills, and conceptual understanding sequentially year on year through repeated encounters in different historical contexts. This means that children can revisit prior learning and begin to secure a ‘mental timeline’ of the past and build a coherent narrative across time We aim to bring history alive and excite our young learners, whilst encouraging them to pose perceptive questions, weigh evidence, sift arguments, and formulate their own opinions. We want them to develop a sense of identity through learning about the past and begin to understand how the past has shaped the present and will, in turn, impact upon on the future.

We concentrate on the innovative use of timelines and sequencing tools to allow our pupils to gain an understanding of History. We plan creatively to transport our pupils learning across significant time frames and in doing so build solid schemas, the mental structures that an individual needs in order to organize knowledge and guide cognitive processes and behaviour, in the process.  

We teach children a robust and secure sense of chronology, in order to develop a sense of identity and a cultural understanding based on their rich local and national historical heritage. This enables our children to learn to value their own and other people’s cultures in modern multicultural Britain. We aim to make all children aware of the actions of select important individuals in history and enable children to know about significant events in British history, whilst appreciating how things have changed over time.

Through progressive and sequential teaching of subject content, concepts and chronology, children at Seahouses Primary School achieve challenging outcomes and develop their skills as young historians. As well as inspiring a love of history, our curriculum promotes an enquiry based approach to learning which prepares children to be confident and engaged citizens of their world who understand the contested nature of knowledge and that sources of information may not represent objective ‘truth’.

As a school, we work with the Historical Association to further support historical knowledge and understanding in school and to ensure that we remain fully up to date with the very best thought, evidence and pedagogy.