Oddizzi - The St George's Way
We have created our own Planning Pathway for Geography to suit our location, cultural identity and wider curriculum. However , we have created our pathway based on an Oddizzi Planning Pathway as we subscribe to Oddizzi for resources and planning.
We have chosen to subscribe to a single resource provider as we wanted to have access to a wealth of resources, a consistency of approach to planning and the security of being able build a progressive pathway to wards the aquisiton of knowledge and skills whilst maintaining the flexibilty of creating our own curriculum map for our own circumstances: Oddizzi filled this brief for us.
We began our subscription July 2023 in readiness for the 2023 / 24 academic year.
Our map serves to build skills within conceptual lines of enquiry in the first and second terms within each year group with a place study positioned at the end of an academic year which allows for the application of skills in a 'place' context.
We have chosen a number of geographical concepts and disciplines through which to channel our learning and these are : place and space; environment and earth systems; cause, consequence and sustainability; change over time; similarity, difference and connection; mapping and scale; and vocabulary, communication and interpretation . We can use these three elements to help us to examine similarity and difference and continuity and change.
There are many overlaps betwen the planning and teaching of History and Geography in our school and this is our intention .
Whilst we have modofied an Oddizzi Planning Pathway, we have ensured that our design does not compromise planned progression from the original scheme.
Oddizzi ressources allow teachers to be creative within the planning guidance. Whilst keeping to progression statements, Teachers modify the planning sequences to suit how they would like to teach a topic.
We have chosen and planned several strategically placed field trip opportunities within our pathway including : a visit to moorland to see the impact of plate tectonics and to experience an AONB; a visit to a wind turbine; a visit to the site of a nuclear power station; a second visit to an area of high ground (The Quantocks) to compare and contrast to Exmoor; a river walk to experience the course of a river first hand ; and two local area visits at either end of the school currirulum which provide excellent assessment reference points for skills progression.
Please see the table of Field Trip Enquiry questions which has been designed for progression. Reference to field trips is made within the planning.
It is our intention to create a set of 'sticky facts' and 'skills assessment tasks ' for each year group which we will use to track knowledge aquisition and skills development. We will use data from these tasks as a basis for reporting to parents and as year group transition data. Information from assessments will be used to inform future planning and possible intervention to close learning gaps and to provide effective differentiation. This approach will be in line with our current practice in History, Science and RE.
It is also our intention to add in our own lessons on evaluation of evidence next year as we have done within our History Curriculum in order to develop our children's critical thinking skills and to further make the curriuculum our own.
