Teaching Ideas for a Geography Day!

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?