Curriculum Making
Teaching Ideas - Making and Using Maps
Contributed by Sue King
Longthorpe Primary School, Peterborough
Our school has just over 400 pupils from Reception to Year 6 with two classes per year group. It is situated three miles west of Peterborough City Centre. 40% of children are from out of our catchment area with 49% EAL and 11% SEN.
IWB's are installed throughout school and I wanted to be able to advise staff as geography co-ordinator on how to make the most of ICT in their geography teaching.
The Gingerbread Man - Making Maps
In Reception we used the story of The Gingerbread Man as the basis of a unit of work. In groups, the children were shown how to use the program and then, in pairs, left to draw a map of the journey that the Gingerbread Man took.
Using Outline Maps with Year 5
A new area of study for our school has been undertaken by Year 5 this term. It is on Migration as Peterborough has a large immigrant population. Following the first meeting I ordered some of the map whiteboards. These have been used by Year 5 to identify countries that migrants to our community have come from. The whiteboards were also used to assess the countries children could remember and identify following their visit to Lincoln Road - an area highly populated with immigrants.
In the following PowerPoint presentation, Sue explains in more detail how these units of work came about.
Download: Sue's Learning Journey (PowerPoint, 592k)
Evaluation
Children enjoyed making maps but I need to check that their work is saved. Lot more can be developed in school once I am really confident in using the software. Good feedback on whiteboard maps from KS2.
Further Development
Use of background maps to help KS2 in their various geography topics eg to plot shops on Lincoln Road (Year 5 - Migration), maps of Helpston, Stamford and Peterborough (Year 3 / 4 - Village, Town and City)
Links
Year 5 are working toward a Travel Fair with stalls highlighting foods and cultural activities based on countries where some of the people in our community have migrated from.
Year 3 / 4's Grand Finale is to follow an orienteering course in a local forest. This follows on from learning to read maps when we study Village, Town and City.
Talk Curriculum Making
Discussions: 2