Key Stage 2 – Humanities
WES Humanities is a topic based course which is made up of work in Geography and History with a short RE focus in each term. The topic work also offers some Art and Design Technology activities. Through Humanities, children discover how the past has affected our present lives, compare their own home environment to other parts of the world, learn to understand and respect other cultures and beliefs and to think about their own contribution to a sustainable future.
The national curriculum for history aims to ensure that all pupils:
- know and understand the history of Britain as a coherent, chronological narrative,
- know and understand significant aspects of the history of the wider world: the nature of ancient civilisations; features of past non-European societies
- understand historical concepts such as continuity and change, cause and consequence, similarity, difference and significance
- understand the methods of historical enquiry and discern how and why contrasting arguments and interpretations of the past have been constructed
- gain historical perspective by placing their growing knowledge into different contexts.
The national curriculum for geography aims to ensure that all pupils:
- develop contextual knowledge of the location of globally significant places including their defining physical and human characteristics
- understand the processes that give rise to key physical and human geographical features of the world,
and that pupils are competent in a range of geographical skills.
Within their work in geography, children will develop
- Locational knowledge
- Place knowledge
- Geographical skills and fieldwork
- and will become familiar with a range of aspects of Human and physical geography
Religious Education (RE) is not included in the national curriculum but all schools are expected to include this as a subject area. A short topic is included in all years.
Topics included in the WES Key Stage 2 Humanities course include all those specified in the national curriculum History and Geography programmes of study and are as follows:
Year 3 | Year 5 |
· Zooming In! (mapwork)
· Ancient Egypt · Weather and climate · Stone Age to Bronze Age · Iron Age and Celtic Culture · Rivers; The Amazon River |
· Anglo Saxon settlements
· Dividing up the world · Invasion of the Vikings · Sustainable development – tourism · Non-European civilisation – The Maya · The world’s biomes |
Year 4 | Year 6 |
· Ancient Greece
· A UK settlement · The Roman world · Comparing countries – North & South America · The Legacy of Greece and Rome · The World Rumbles |
· Children through History
· Economic activity · The impact of the railways · Focus on Europe – Italy and Poland · Early Islamic civilisation · Focus on California/Brazil |