HASLAM PARK PRIMARY SCHOOL

PLEASE ALSO SEE WHOLE SCHOOL CURRICULUM OVERVIEW

Knowledge Organisers

What are knowledge organisers?

Knowledge organisers are a summary of the key facts and essential knowledge that pupils need about a unit of work or a curriculum subject. They should be no more than one side of A4 with all the information broken down into easily digestible chunks.

The single side of A4 is important in order to focus the minds of the teachers creating them so they only include what’s absolutely crucial. It is easy for knowledge organisers to become overwhelmingly full of information which then renders them useless.

Knowledge organisers can be used for any subject or year group, from the humanities such as history and English to maths and science.

It is also important to state what a knowledge organiser is not:

Knowledge organisers are not a curriculum and they will never replace the expert teacher. It’s best to think of them as tools to help teachers enact a curriculum. 

Who uses knowledge organisers?

Knowledge organisers can be a valuable tool for both children, staff and parents. Subject leaders are usually the ones who write the knowledge organiser, to set out their expectations of what pupils should learn about a topic – and to clarify their own thinking around what is important.

Pupils will review, revise and quiz themselves using their knowledge organisers.

And finally knowledge organisers are a really clear and easy to understand way for parents to be more aware of what their children are learning at primary school and thus to support them.

Knowledge organiser contents

 This is a basic contents list but each knowledge organiser may look slightly different.

• key vocabulary 

• key places and people

• useful diagrams (as required for the topic)

• key dates for a subject like history (e.g. when the two World Wars were) would clearly also be included

• key themes – essential for any Key Stage 2 reading work

• important quotes (that demonstrate those themes)

• stem sentences for a subject like Maths

How can I as a parent use the knowledge organisers?

Talk to your child about what they are going to learn, ask them afterwards what they have learnt .

Ask them which facts they can remember.

Ask them to tell you what they learnt yesterday/ last week or last month