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Ages: 7-11
Focus on Geography by having a Geography Day in your classroom! Our post has plenty of cross-curricular ideas to try with your children.
These ideas could also be used as part of Geography lessons in a week, month or term.
Teaching Ideas and Resources:
English
- Read a book set in a contrasting part of the world to your own, for example, Kensuke’s Kingdom by Michael Morpurgo or the Katie Morag stories by Mairi Hedderwick. Discuss similarities and differences.
- Design a persuasive leaflet promoting your town to visitors. What can people do, and where should they visit?
- Give groups of children locations around the world. Can they write a postcard including information that will identify where they are?
Maths
- Read scales on different instruments, for example, rain gauges, thermometers and anemometers.
- Try out some transport timetable word problems.
- Make graphs showing the temperature, wind speed or rainfall of the current week. Compare it to the same week in the previous year.
Science
- Compare the temperature in different cities of the world. Why are they different?
- Make a water cycle in a bag.
- Visit Recycle More for lots of ideas about recycling and reducing waste.
Computing
- Create a geography quiz in Powerpoint.
- Visit all seven continents on Google Earth.
- Set up a treasure hunt around your school and grounds using QR codes with this useful program from Class Tools.
- Set up some maps for your roamers or Beebots to navigate.
Design Technology
- Compare houses around the world.
Art
- Look at the work of Andy Goldsworthy and create some outdoor art yourself from natural objects.
- Make a papier mache map of a country or even the whole world.
Music
- Listen to music from different countries and have a go at making up your own in the same style.
- Take the instruments outside and compose or play some music in the fresh air.
Geography
- Set up an orienteering trail on the school grounds.
- Look at your local area on Google Maps or Google Earth. Draw a map showing your route from home to school.
- Become a travel agent and plan a trip. Include modes of transport, accommodation and an itinerary of things to do.
- Look at some features of your local area. Are they natural or manmade? How can you tell?
- Set up a weather station on the school grounds.
- Give each class a country to research and come together at the end of the day to share what you have learnt.
- Find your birthday coordinates with one of these fun ideas from National Geographic.
- Get outside and build some dens.
- Use our Inspiration posters to start discussions about geographical concepts.
History
- Use some old photos of your locality to investigate how human geography has changed over time. For example, how has the high street changed?
Physical education
- Learn some dances from other countries.
Religious education
- Research religions around the world. Find out where they started and mark those places on a world map.
- Look at this World Religions map. Why do you think that specific religions are concentrated in different parts of the world?
Languages
- Learn how to say a few key phrases in the language of a country you have been studying.
- Learn the names of cities in their native language and other languages. For example, London (English), Londres (French) Londen (Dutch).
PSHE
- Discuss the impact of humans on the planet. How would it be different if humans didn’t exist?
1 comment
In order to teach geography this is what I do. Recently in a lesson I presented the entire class with a large blank map of Europe. I asked them to label and annotate the whole map in question using four different colours.
For example they had to use blue for France, red for Germany, yellow for Spain and green for all other EU countries. The very next homework task I set them involved the rivers. Now they had to hand in a mini essay, short article or a fact file on the rivers in Europe.
Half of the class gave me a short article on five rivers the following week, as we divided them up. I had a written up list to refer to. I also had a few fact files and short illustrated essays to grade. We do fun quizzes as well. These are a classic short term option to use to check on their understanding and vocabulary.
Written work takes the form of a booklet, quiz etc. I also have asked for timed essays and a few power point talks. They have also handed in a number of illustrated short articles each single term too. Sometimes I hand out the tasks to assess their interest. Once a term in a lesson we draw a class map.
And we discuss things face to face. Homework exercises vary. They like quizzes and articles on different topics. We do oral work in addition. One lesson was spent on the common words used in geography. They love to do research.