My street and my school
Geography · Early Years · The School
What is around you
Look out of a window. Name five things. Houses. A road. Trees. A shop. A bus. Those are the FEATURES of your place. Every place has different ones. A village has fields where a city has flats. Noticing them is the first thing a geographer does.
The way to school
Talk through your journey to school. Out of the door. Left at the postbox. Past the big tree. Over the crossing. That is a ROUTE. Say it in order. Order is what makes directions work. Now try describing it to someone who has never been.
A map is a picture from above
Imagine you are a bird looking straight down. A table becomes a rectangle. A round rug becomes a circle. Draw your bedroom that way. Put in the bed, the door and the window. Now you have made a map. Maps do not show what things look like from the side. They show what things look like from above.
Put a cup, a book and a pencil on a table. Draw them as you normally would, from the side. You can see the cup's handle. You can see the book's cover. Now stand on a chair. Look straight down. Draw them again. The cup is a circle. The book is a rectangle. The pencil is a thin line. That second drawing is a MAP. Same objects, seen from the one angle maps always use.