Geography Teaching Today

Rosemary Crocker explains how this plan of work came about...

I felt it was important to develop children's basic geographical knowledge of how places are represented through maps, the fieldwork was easily accessible in our local country park, and I wanted to use ICT & literacy to develop cross-curricular links.

World Maps and Coordinates

Coordinates were covered in maths and we used them to make treasure maps and play Battleships. As part of the Weather around the World unit we look at life in Pangnirtung, Baffin Island. The children use the large world map to locate the UK and Baffin Island and compared life in Pangnirtung to their lives in Walkden. We developed a game where children sent a teddy or doll to different locations using coordinates. We had already covered the points of the compass in science when discussing sunrise and sunset. In Literacy we wrote directions for how to get to and from school and how to get to a friend's house. We sent people all over the school too. They all managed to find their way back again.




Wonderful Walkden

In the second half of the spring term we began to look at the reasons for living in Walkden. This involved some local history as Walkden was a mining town and once had some mills. The children produced an information booklet about the town and its facilities. After going on a walk around the area and collecting information the children drew sketch maps of the locality. They also used the Local Studies software to make simple maps on which they noted housing, shops, businesses, the new health centre, churches and roads.




Journey into the Wild

Now we were ready for the fun part. At the end of May we walked to our local country park where, after looking at various types of maps, we went on a short walk making a journey stick as a record of our trip. The children shared their journey stick stories. After the walk and talk they used their journey sticks to produce a linear map with a key as a record of their day out. At the end of the topic we displayed the children's work in the school entrance so that it could be seen by as many people as possible.

Download: My Learning Journey
Download: Medium term plan of work for this unit
Download: Lesson by lesson overview

Evaluation

The fieldwork worked well and went smoothly. The children's sketch-maps showed how they wanted to represent the area and were of a pleasing standard. I have become far more confident in teaching this unit and using ICT.

Further Development

Later in the key stage I would introduce scale and more symbols for children's maps.

Links
Google Earth
MultiMap
Find out more about journey sticks at Teacher's TV


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