Geography Teaching Today

The Bawburgh School is a small primary school on the outskirts of Norwich. They have a wide catchment area, with only a few children from the village itself. There are four classes, two for Foundation and Key Stage 1 and two for Key Stage 2. Chris teaches in the Reception class and also has responsibility for teaching Humanities in the top KS2 class and Spanish throughout the school. (This will change next year.)

Chris said of the unit: "I'm interested in developing the teaching of geography throughout the school and see ICT as a way of enthusing the other members of staff."

A teaching unit for the Foundation Stage

The topic for my Reception class next term is Fairy Stories so I have decided to work on making maps to go with each story. We will start out by making a class map for The Three Little Pigs. We will look at adding features and some hot spots with text before the children start to make their own maps for the other fairy stories we will cover. Here's hoping!

The children added one hotspot for each house, telling a little of the story in each one. They also added hotspots for the orchard, the 'turnip' field and the funfair. All in all this was a very successful project and the children really enjoyed using the programme. View the PowerPoint presentation below to learn more about how the project developed. 

Download: Presentation about how the units were taught (PowerPoint, 481k)
Download: Oultine plan of unit (Word, 29k)
Download: Medium term plan of unit (Word, 59k)

Upper KS2 unit: creating maps of Bawburgh

I am also responsible for teaching Humanities in the top Key Stage 2 class (Year 5 and 6). In the Spring Term we were due to be studying the local area and this seemed an ideal opportunity to introduce Local Studies to these children. The Bawburgh maps proved to be quite a challenge for the children as most do not live in Bawburgh and they suddenly realised that they knew very little about the village. We began by walking around Bawburgh and taking pictures of some buildings. The children produced their maps and added information about various buildings using hotspots. The children became adept at inserting pictures and adding text. Browse the PowerPoint presentation above to learn more.

Download: Creating village maps with Local Studies (Word, 28k)

Evaluation
I was pleased with the enthusiasm of the children and they really seemed to enjoy finding out about the local area from a different aspect.

Further Developments
I am looking forward to using the (Local Studies) software in different topics next term and during the next academic year. Now that I know how long it takes I feel that I will be able to take account of this in my planning.

Curriculum Links
There are obvious links to ICT and Literacy and I plan to make maps of West Stowe Anglo Saxon settlement when covering this topic in history.

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