History — Olive Hill Primary Academy

Our Vision and Aims for History

“The more you know about the past, the better prepared you are for the future”

Theodore Roosevelt

History is a subject that captures the imagination of children and sparks an interest in where we have been so that we can better understand where we are now and where we are going. History is about real people and real events which took place in the past. History is concerned with sequence, time and chronology. We hope that children will develop into passionate, engaged and lifelong historians.

Here at Olive Hill, the aims of our history lessons are:

To instil in the children a curiosity and understanding of events, places and people in a variety of times and environments;
To develop an interest in the past and an appreciation of human achievements and aspirations.
To understand the values of our society;
To learn about the major issues and events in the history of our own country and of the world and how these events may have influenced one another;
To develop a knowledge of chronology within which the children can organise their understanding of the past;
To understand how the past was different from the present and that people of other times and places may have had different values and attitudes from ours.

Through high-quality history lessons children will have access to a wide range of resources to aid them in their discovery and will have opportunities across the curriculum to present, test and evaluate their historical knowledge. We also seek to broaden children’s real-life experiences both inside and outside of school through educational visits, visitors, experimentation, exploration and discovery.

History is just more than learning facts and we believe that within history lessons, our children acquire a range of knowledge and skills, which they can then apply to other subjects and in a variety of situations.

We teach children the skills required to be a good historian; how to research and gather information, how to consider the validity, reliability and perspective of the source and how to ask questions. These are lifelong, transferable skills. Through our history teaching, we aim that children will become lifelong, inquisitive learners and develop a sense of empathy and understanding through learning about past events from all over the world.