Our curriculum journey

Ahead of another new academic year, it's been time to refresh the topics we teach. We've changed things around a little and dropped a topic to make space for others to stretch out a little, and have some flexibility for other events which may or many not happen.

Here's our Curriculum Journey from Y6-Y8, after which the students move up to Senior School.

We have a separate diagram for Y3-5 Geography which I'm still updating.

Thanks to the person who produced the original template whose identity I have lost over the years... if you recognise it please let me know and I'll add a credit to the post.

Farmers for Schools

We were delighted to welcome local arable farmer, Luke Abblitt, to King's Ely Prep last week.
Luke - also known as 'Farmer Luke' on Instagram - is based near Ramsey, and is a 'Farmers for Schools Ambassador' for the NFU (National Farmers'​ Union).


Helen Melville, my colleague, invited Luke into school to talk to Year 7 pupils, as part of our 'Food for Thought' topic.

Helend said: 

"Luke spoke to us about his crops, what he can grow and when, and he explained his modern crop rotation to us. Luke discussed some of the issues facing modern farming, and how he tries to overcome these; in particular the problem of excess potatoes that he has at the moment, which was really relevant to our recent work on the rising costs of fish and chips.

"We had the opportunity to ask loads of questions about many aspects of farming, which Luke answered with detail and enthusiasm. Luke was very impressed with all the questions, and how keen and interested our pupils were. Thank you to Luke for sparing us some time in his very busy schedule!"

Image: Jordan Day

Article in Teaching Times

I was contacted by Teaching Times who were interested in the session I had planned for the GA Conference 2024 on 'Everyday Geographies', which was called 'Wake up, smell the geography'. I turned it into a piece which fitted their structure and it has now been published on their website. A recent piece on GIS was written by Katie Hall I noticed.

You will need a subscription to read the whole piece, but you can read the first part at least.

Subscribers will also be able to see the final section where there is a chance for you to get in touch and share your own everyday curriculum adventures...

School's out

My 11th year is now over and this is the first week of the summer holidays. I've already been quite busy with some external projects and PGQM moderation, and work related to my new RGS role.

One of my jobs is to finalise some documents ahead of the arrival of our new headteacher, who wants to get up to speed on our curriculum across the Prep school.

This is our newly updated Curriculum journey / roadmap for the new academic year.

We are tweaking all the content as always.

150 000 page views

This blog has been around for over ten years now, and although not near the millions of views that LivingGeography has (and the even higher numbers that GeographyPages had at its peak), it's pleasing to see that people are still finding it useful to see what I've been doing in my classroom. 

You can also see some of our KS2 work on the Resetting KS2 Geography blog.

Thanks for visiting and reading.

New school identity

On return to school when term starts tomorrow, I will be at a 'new school' as we are rebranding to King's Ely Prep from King's Ely Junior. I will be interested to see how quickly all references to Junior disappear.