Geography for 3rd Class

Establish that the locality has physical geography the class can name and describe accurately, and that the children can find it themselves. Two field lessons survey real features; the module closes by identifying something the class could actually do to protect or improve one of them.

1. Naming Our Ground
2. 1 What Is Our Place Made Of? Sample lesson
3. 2 The Features Walk
4. 3 Onto the Map Wall
5. Water, Living Things and Stewardship
6. 4 Where Does Our Water Go?
7. 5 Living Things Belong to the Features
8. 6 Something We Could Actually Do

Follow four resources named by the outcome (water, land, food and transport) to where each comes from and where it goes. Two field lessons and two datasets the class gathers itself show how these resources are used and managed in the locality.

1. Water and Land
2. 7 Where Our Water Comes From
3. 8 The Land-use Walk
4. 9 Reading Our Land-use Map
5. Food and Transport
6. 10 Where Our Food Comes From
7. 11 The Traffic Survey
8. 12 What the Traffic Tells Us

Map and classify the economic activities of the locality now, then ask the same question of three generations ago and characterise the change. The module closes by proposing one kind of work that could plausibly happen here, argued from the maps on the wall.

1. Work Now
2. 13 What Work Happens Here?
3. 14 The Working-places Walk
4. 15 Why Here?
5. Work Then, and What Could Come Next
6. 16 The Work That Used to Be Here
7. 17 Then and Now, Side by Side
8. 18 What Could Happen Next?

Step the scale up from the locality to the island. Investigate how people responded to the opportunities and challenges of Ireland's natural environment, and identify the major infrastructural networks as national answers to national problems, always returned to what reaches the class's own place.

1. Settlement and Local Challenge
2. 19 Our Place on the Island
3. 20 Why Towns Are Where They Are
4. 21 A Challenge This Place Actually Has
5. Networks Across the Country
6. 22 The Networks That Cross the Country
7. 23 Why the Line Goes That Way
8. 24 What Our Locality Is Connected By

Investigate the importance of the sun and moon for life on Earth through measurements the class makes itself: shadows, day and night, seasons, weather, the growing year, and the moon's cycle with tides and sleep. Built on the class's own data rather than on diagrams alone.

1. Shadows, Day and Seasons
2. 25 Our Own Shadows
3. 26 Day and Night
4. 27 Why the Year Has Seasons
5. Weather, Growing and the Moon
6. 28 Our Own Weather
7. 29 What the Sun Grows
8. 30 The Moon, the Tides and Sleep

Reach the widest scale last by putting the known inside the new. Compare Ireland's physical features with Europe's and the world's, understand borders as lines people agreed, practise locating and naming, describe places in Ireland that traditions attach to, and meet children's daily lives elsewhere through geography.

1. Scale, Features and Different Ground
2. 31 Ireland Inside Europe
3. 32 Bigger Than Ours
4. 33 Different Ground, Different Life
5. Borders, Traditions and Children Elsewhere
6. 34 Places That Hold a Tradition
7. 35 Holding the Map
8. 36 Children Somewhere Else