Humanities in Year 3 - Year 6
Implementation of Opening Worlds at Mendip Green
From September 2023, we have adopted the Opening Worlds humanities curriculum for history, geography and RE.
The Opening Worlds curriculum and its associated teaching approaches will secure the highest possible quality of education for pupils. This is because the curriculum ensures that the subjects reflect the wide reference and academic practices, outside of school, to which they refer. In addition, the material is organised so that pupils use earlier material to access to later material and so that pupils start to see how everything connects within a subject.
Opening Worlds has strongly recommended that the material is taught in sequence because each part makes the next part much more understandable. Numerous words that are explicitly taught and practised in Year 3 are then taken for granted in lessons in Year 4-6. If children do not have the secure knowledge of the content and vocabulary of the Year 3 curriculum, this is likely to slow progress and limit enjoyment.
All key stage 2 children have, therefore, started with the Year 3 Opening Worlds curriculum.
As a result of moving from the school’s previous curriculum to Opening Worlds, the school has identified a small number of content gaps. These have been noted and will be addressed through our choice of books that are used in English and read to children, field trips and acts of collective worship.
The table below shows how the curriculum will progress over the coming years. The blue highlighting shows when cohorts will be taught the correct year group curriculum for their age.
Intent of the ‘Opening Worlds’ curriculum:
Opening Worlds is a knowledge-rich humanities programme for teaching history, geography and religion in Years 3 to 6.
- The programme meets and substantially exceeds the demand of the National Curriculum for history and geography.
- The religion programme is compatible with the objectives of SACRE locally agreed syllabuses in RE but substantially exceeds the knowledge-base that such local RE syllabuses offer.
The programme is characterised by strong vertical sequencing within subjects so that pupils gain security in a rich, broad vocabulary through systematic introduction, sustained practice and deliberate revisiting. Intricate horizontal and diagonal connections, create a curriculum whose effects are far greater than the sum of their parts.
Features of the Opening Worlds curriculum include:
thoroughness in knowledge-building, achieved through intricate coherence and tight sequencing;
global and cultural breadth, embracing wide diversity across ethnicity, gender, region and community;
rapid impact on literacy through systematic introduction and revisiting of new vocabulary;
subject-specific disciplinary rigour, teaching pupils to interpret and argue, to advance and weigh claims, and to understand the distinctive ways in which subject traditions enquire and seek truth;
well-told stories: beautifully written narratives and the nurture of teachers’ own story-telling art;
a highly inclusive approach, secured partly through common knowledge (giving access to common language) and partly through thorough high-leverage teaching that is pacey, oral, interactive and fun;
efficient use of lesson time, blending sharp pace, sustained practice and structured reflection;
The structure of the curriculum:
This approach has a coherent, chronological and rigorous structure that ensures that links are not only made across individual subjects but also across each of the topics covered. This means that knowledge is gradually and successfully built upon and children make explicit links using their previous knowledge. This is continually revisited and retrieved. The coverage of each humanities subject can be seen below:
