Our curriculum at Drayton Community Infant School has been designed and updated in a way that supports all children and recognises the Characteristics of Effective Learning through engaging enquiry-based topics that promote the children to become historians. We strive to create an environment where the children feel comfortable enough to ask questions and explore the history of Great Britain and the wider world. History at Drayton Community Infant School encourages the children to be critical thinkers, source analysts, investigators and inquisitive learners. We have created and shaped our curriculum to be supportive and accessible to all children within our school. We are aware of the children’s capabilities and where they need targeted support, planning this curriculum with the needs of each individual child in mind. We introduce the children to new vocabulary, and cross curricular links to the Power of Reading to ensure the sessions and teaching is engaging and purposeful. Resources are prepared to support the children’s learning. Through careful language and thoughtful delivery, the children’s exposure to the subject is always a positive one, promoting wider thinking, curiosity and understanding of the world.

Children gain familiarity with a wide range of historical people, events and places that help them to develop a good understanding of chronology. Children are supported and encouraged to use a rich and vibrant vocabulary in and around the subject, supporting their communication and language development. The children will begin to tackle and understand historical concepts. These include change, cause, consequence, similarity, difference, and significance. These concepts equip the children to dive into comparing and contrasting, asking appropriate questions and to come to their own conclusions, whether that be orally, written or drawn. Children tackle and answer large enquiry questions to create a broad and secure understanding of a particular person, event or place in history. Through this, the children will use primary and secondary sources, and other evidence to support arguments, come to conclusions, and understand how they are used outside of the classroom environment. The children will be able to develop a sense that they have a place within the historical timeline that we encounter. The children will be able to begin to take a step back and see short-term and long-term timescales, and how the events, people and places within this are connected, in order to form a bigger picture and develop a timeline.

We at DCIS, create a number of enquiry-based units of work which are designed to draw the most out of the children, and equip them with the skills needed. The children’s learning and exploration will be supported by a wide range of engaging and specific fiction and non-fiction books, as well as appropriate access to primary and secondary sources. Carefully planned enquiry questions which allow the children to delve deeper into a specific area or period of history, in a way that ignites their curiosity and ensures a secure coverage of the KS1 national curriculum. The curriculum at our school has been developed and planned to allow for there to be many cross-curricular links, which allows for the learning to be embedded and revisited frequently to support the needs of all children, and their learning. History at Drayton Community Infant School will equip the children with the skills to identify resources and explore how they can be used, handled, cared for and identified. The children’s historical exploration will be supported alongside their exploration of different trips, including local history walks, Gressenhall and online trips and tours of museums and galleries.