At Fetcham Village Infant School we want the children to recognise what a unique and special planet they live on. Through our teaching of Geography across the curriculum we nurture respect and love for the environment in which they live at a local, national and international scale. 

The children are given the skills and knowledge needed to be able to gain an understanding of relationships between places, people and environments. At a local level, they use the stunning outside area to learn about weather patterns, similarities and differences of animals and plants in their local habitats before moving on to comparing what they know with other places in the world. The children have opportunities for trips to local areas with contrasting features for example, local woodland and a local village. Topics across all year groups enthuse the children with wanting to find out about other countries where skills and knowledge can be taught through a variety of means such as using maps, atlases, globes and aerial photos. Children communicate their learning through sketch maps with a key, diagrams, graphs, 3D models, presentations and written work. Opportunities for local community to visit and share their experiences of the wider world with the children, including parents, staff and ex pupils, are actively encouraged. Children love learning through first-hand experiences and artefacts and are given opportunities to take risks through discussions and debates about topical environmental and geographical issues.

We do this by:

• Ensuring we teach skills in context of places and themes rather than in isolation.
• Providing children with first hand geographical experiences through fieldwork in the immediate environment thus providing a context in which they can develop skills of enquiry and recording.
• Ensuring a progression of skills through the school.
• Using secondary sources of information to support their learning, for example; books, T.V. programmes, websites, aerial photographs and maps.
• Developing and allowing children to use their computer skills to enhance their study of geography.
• Teaching appropriate geographical vocabulary and ensuring children are using it in their descriptions and explanations of the geography content they are studying. 
• Helping children make comparisons between places and geographical features.
• Teaching children to recognise the features that give a locality its character e.g. a busy shopping area or farmland.
• Encouraging children to be aware of how our interaction with the environment can affect its appearance and sustainability.
• Giving children opportunities to express their own views about the physical and human features of the environment and support their views with examples. 
• Careful questioning will be used to enable the children to develop their knowledge and understanding of geographical information.

Outcomes in books evidence a broad and balanced geography curriculum and demonstrate the children’s acquisition and understanding of identified key knowledge and skills. At the end of each topic children discuss what they have learnt, compared to their starting points.

Please do contact Mrs Stokes through the school office if you would like any further information on our Geography curriculum.