At Stoke St Gregory, geography is taught as a journey of exploration, discovery, and enquiry, where children develop a rich understanding of the world around them through meaningful, carefully-sequenced learning. Our geography curriculum is built around substantive threads in both human and physical geography, which run through all classes. These threads include settlements, economic activity and land use in human geography; biomes, landscapes, water and climate in physical geography. By revisiting these big ideas in different contexts and year groups, pupils deepen their understanding over time and build strong geographical schema. 

Big Questions 

Big Questions drive each unit, encouraging children to think critically about how and why places, people, and environments differ. These questions promote curiosity while ensuring pupils develop the core knowledge identified in our curriculum intent -knowledge that is specific, purposeful, and taught to be remembered. We break down these big ideas into smaller units to support all pupils to access and retain key knowledge, with structured lessons, retrieval practice, and explicit vocabulary instruction. Units are intentionally designed to focus on depth rather than breadth, allowing pupils to explore geographical ideas thoroughly and meaningfully. Incorporated within the units is a range of media to help access and develop disciplinary knowledge of key aspects within our geography curriculum.  

Local context 

A strong emphasis is placed on local geography, enabling pupils to understand the unique features of Stoke St Gregory and the Somerset Levels. Pupils investigate the environmental challenges and successes of their local area and compare these with contrasting regions around the world. 

Through carefully planned progression from EYFS to Year 6, pupils build detailed knowledge of the world’s places, environments, and processes. They develop an understanding of scale and learn how human and physical geography interconnect.  

Trips, visits and experiences 

We enrich our curriculum through experiences, whether that be to support fieldwork or geographical knowledge. These experiences provide links from the classroom to the world around us. 

Ultimately, geography at Stoke St Gregory aims to cultivate curious, informed, and responsible young people. Through experiential learning, enquiry, and a rich, knowledge-led curriculum, our pupils develop a sense of place and are given the tools to access, enjoy and succeed in geography.