History
"We are not makers of History. We are made by History." (Martin Luther King Jr.)
At Hillcroft, our aim is to encourage pupils to develop an appreciation and understanding of the past and how that has influenced our future. History enables children to develop a context for their growing sense of identity and a chronological framework for their knowledge of significant events and people. Through evaluating primary and secondary sources, historical enquiry and immersing themselves into engaging historical experiences, this can influence the children at Hillcroft to make decisions about personal choices, attitudes, and values.
We develop children with the following essential characteristics to help them become historians:
- An excellent knowledge and understanding of people, events and contexts from a range of historical periods, including significant events in Britain’s past and chronological timelines;
- The ability to think critically about history and communicate ideas confidently to a range of audiences;
- The ability to support, evaluate and challenge their own and others’ views using historical evidence from a range of sources;
- The ability to think, reflect, debate, discuss and evaluate the past by formulating and refining questions and lines of enquiry;
- A respect for historical evidence and the ability to make critical use of it to support their learning;
- A desire to embrace challenging activities, including opportunities to undertake high-quality research across a range of history topics;
- A developing sense of curiosity about the past and how and why people interpret the past in different ways.
By the end of Year 6, we want our children to have a sound understanding of chronology and the ability to apply this to a range of historical events, the skill to interpret and investigate a range of primary and secondary historical evidence, and to be able to ask and interpret questions
Pupil Voice:
I like History because I learn about the past and I like that we get to learn about things that happened a long time ago. Daniel, Year 1
I enjoy history because you get to learn about previous ages, space, travel, the old olympics and the Iron Age. I like it because it’s interesting and I get to learn lots of facts.
Sophie, Year 4
The things I like about history are that we get to learn about things that happened centuries ago. You get to see the different things they had to go through and that is interesting and sometimes quite sad.
Freya, Year 6
Progression of Skills and Knowledge:
At Hillcroft Primary School, we follow the National Curriculum. From this, we ensure that skills and knowledge are taught in the appropriate year groups to ensure progression and sequencing.
Across Early Years, to ensure progression from the newly published Early Years Framework into KS1, we follow the revised and updated July 2021 version of Development Matters. In our Nursery, children are aged three and four, and so the progression maps show the objectives related to Three and Four year-old objectives. However, some children join after just turning three, therefore, with these children and following rigorous assessment of starting points, it may be deemed necessary to look at the Birth to Three objectives too.
For more information on this, please see the Nursery and Reception year group pages. Below are links to our Progression of Skills and Knowledge documents.
