Getting Started
Young Geographers Go Local looks at how we can help children explore their own personal geographies in a local context. You will find out about digital mapping and how this technology can help children to show 'how they feel' in a particular locality and enable them to make better sense of their world. This CPD unit is based on an actual unit of work called 'Mapping our feelings about the school and grounds'. This work was originally undertaken with a Year 5 class, though this should not be thought of as the only appropriate age-group for teaching this unit. For example, some of these activities have also been undertaken with pupils as young as Year 1.
Outline of this CPD unit
There are two main aspects to this CPD unit:
- teaching with ICT
- teaching about the locality in which the children live, i.e. the local area.
Introducing Quikmaps will introduce you to, or increase your familiarity with the online mapping programme Quikmaps. If you are familiar with this programme you may decide to skip this section - though there are some links to two community uses of this programme that you may not have seen.
In Getting to know your local area, you will reflect on how you will gain greater familiarity with the local area of the school. This is often a real problem for teachers who do not live locally and doubly difficult for teachers who have only just moved to a new school.
The next four parts of the unit will provide resources that illustrate how the unit of work was taught. Here you will be provided with ideas that you may be able to adopt and replicate in your classroom. As you gain in confidence you may choose to adapt some of these suggestions to make them more appropriate to your pupils and particular learning context. This will lead to some new, and for your pupils, innovative ways of learning.
We finish off with a section on Pedagogy and Thinking which explores some of the ideas underpinning this unit of work and also a Plenary which offers some suggestions for further research on this subject.
Adapting the unit
As you work through, you should think about how you might adapt the unit to meet the needs of your children and school circumstances.
- Think about the context - will you ask children to map their feelings about a place or might you try a similar idea to that shown on this Canadian website?
- Which software will you use with pupils to enable them to produce their own digital maps?
- Choose an example to talk over and share with a colleague.
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