Making Geography Work

• What do you want the children to learn?

• What skills do you want to focus on?

• What aspects of learning do you intend to cover?

• What do the children already know?

• How will you motivate and engage pupils?

• How will you communicate findings and make them relevant?

Year 4: Using photographs to assess prior knowledge

Year 1: Using drawing and talk to assess prior knowledge

Build up a display with the pupils to engage their interest.

Add some more each lesson and teach over an integrated week.

Provide stimulating resources – use a range of books, maps, artefacts, food, clothes etc.

This teacher had a ‘travel agents’ and a ‘Kenyan market stall’

Teach specific skills and involve pupils (Y4) What route is best for our trip?

Teach specific mapping skills

Get children to ask their own questions.

Contact real people – email, write, visit or invite in to school

Go on fieldwork at different times of the year

Communicating through drawing: a universal language of landscape

A pictorial record of a year’s fieldwork

Each year group (and staff) made a panel based on their fieldwork experience of the locality

Stained glass windows can be simply made as a reminder of the need to preserve and sustain our local heritage.

What geographical experiences link to this finished work?

First hand experience of place, (fieldwork)

Creative inspiration from a sense of place

Using relevant skills, e.g. annotated sketching, digital imaging, collaboration

Asking questions, e.g. Where is this place? What is this place like? Why is it like this? How has it changed?

Learning new and relevant vocabulary

Learning how to improve and sustain localities ESD

Geography is all around us