Geography Knowledge Planner

Principles and Rationale

The Geography Curriculum across school is split into four key strands. These are:

Locational knowledge: Our capacity to know and recall where places are, what we otherwise term our mental map. It is our personal framework for storing the locational information we carry in our heads. For example, I know that Nottingham is a city and it is in the middle of England, next to Derby.

Place knowledge: What a place is like, e.g. I know that Attenborough is a village that has a couple of shops and a church.  It sits next to a river and is part of Nottingham.

Human and physical geography: Physical geography looks at the natural processes of the Earth, such as climate and plate tectonics. Human geography looks at the impact and behaviour of people and how they relate to the physical world.

Geographical Skills and Fieldwork: Geographic skills provide the necessary tools and techniques for us to think geographically. They are central to geography’s distinctive approach to understanding Earth’s physical and human patterns and processes. Geographic skills are used in making decisions important to everyday life—where to buy or rent a home; where to get a job; how to get to work or to a friend’s house; and where to shop, take a holiday, or go to school. All of these decisions involve the ability to acquire, arrange, and use geographic information. Fieldwork is central to the geographical tradition, defined as learning and/or as research involving first-hand experience, which takes place outside the classroom. It is a vital and valuable component of the compulsory phase of every student’s school experience.

Vocabulary: Key vocabulary related to this all 4 key strands of geography. The children build on their knowledge in each of the key strands during each year of school, although different

geography topics within a year may have different points of focus. The children are given opportunities to relate their knowledge of the place studied with others that they know about by, for example, comparing and contrasting ways of life in different parts of the world.

Key knowledge is organised into these strands. This does not represent the entirety of the knowledge covered during a topic, but rather the knowledge most children should know by the end and will therefore be focused on across a series of lessons.