Geography

                                'Let Your Light Shine'

Matthew 5:16

Welcome to Geography at St Peter's C.E. Primary School

At St Peters, we believe that Geography is indispensable to our understanding of the modern world and therefore want to inspire in students a curiosity and fascination about the world and its people that will remain with them for the rest of their lives.

Our aims for teaching Geography at St Peter's are:

• to develop a curiosity and understanding of places and people both locally, nationally and globally.
• to stimulate children’s interest in their surroundings and develop a knowledge and understanding of the physical and human processes which shape places.
• to increase children’s knowledge of other cultures and, in so doing, teach a respect and understanding of what it means to be a positive citizen in a multi-cultural country.
• to provide learning opportunities that enthuse, engage, and motivate children to learn and foster a sense of curiosity and wonder at the beauty of the world around them.
• to encourage in children a commitment to sustainable development and an appreciation of what ‘global citizenship’ means.
• to make sense of their own surroundings through learning about their own locality and the interaction between people and the environment.
• to develop the geographical skills, including how to use, draw and interpret maps of different scales, and the vocabulary necessary to carry out effective geographical enquiry.
• to be able to apply map reading skills to globes and atlas maps and identify geographical features and to make use of digital mapping skills.  
• to formulate appropriate questions, develop research skills and evaluate material to inform opinions.
• to enable children to work geographically in a range of appropriate contexts, using a variety of materials and equipment including other people’s experiences and knowledge.

We have developed our mapping skills by identitying counties around the UK. We then used digimaps to identify the land use in our local area. Building on this we also learnt about the affects of changes to land use through the planning of the HS2 rail link. In groups, we identified reasons for and against the building of this project. 

HS2 train link- a good thing?

UKS2 really enjoyed learning about the planned HS2 rail link in Geography lessons.  They found out all about the plans for new super-fast trains that will link London to Manchester and Leeds.  The trains will have a top speed of 250 miles an hour, cutting journey times in half.  Many people support this plan, however we also heard about the many people who are against the plans as they believe it could ruin precious greenbelt land.  We spent time in groups sorting out the pros and cons for the HS2 link and then wrote a letter to the government outlining our own views on the matter.

Trail detectives

We have been busy navigating our way around the United Kingdom.  We started by using atlases to find the location of major cities in the UK.  We then were set the challenge to pinpoint a variety of different landmarks around the country, such as Buckingham Palace, Lands End and Edinburgh Castle.  It was quite a challenge, but we all really enjoyed hunting the locations down.  We learned the skill of using an index and co-ordinate points to find places quickly.

Digimaps on the iPad to look at our local area. We were able to identify the streets we live on, where school is and where St Peter’s Church is.

Where does our food come from?

In LKS2 we have been investigating where our food comes from.  Many of us did not know that foods that we buy from our local supermarket have often been on a long journey to reach us.  We enjoyed tasting many different foods from around the world and then investigated where in the world they are grown before making the journey to our plates. We annotated our world maps to show where the different foods originated from.  We also discussed why the UK has a good climate for growing certain foods like potatoes, but that it is not great for other foods.

Digital mapping

We were able to search for Chorley and locate St Peter's school.  We could use maps at different scales and label features on our map.  We are looking forward to learning some new digital mapping skills over the year!