Medium-term plan: Where do we live and what makes it special?
Use this KS1 planning to explore the local environment, local wildlife and the local community over a half term.
Helping young children to connect with the world they are part of begins with nurturing their sense of connection to their local environment and local community.
This planning sets out a range of National Curriculum content that could be taught over a half term as part of an enquiry of learning which asks: Where do we live and what makes it special?. Linked to the principle of Adaptation, and within the context of familiar settings and social groups, children are able to explore: what it means to belong; who and what they share the place they call home with; what makes this place and these groups special; and what they would like to do to improve them.
In geography, the children use atlases and simple maps of the local area to locate their village, town or city (there are also opportunities to use online resources in IT & computing) before moving on to survey the buildings and features of their local area and find out why they are significant. The science learning, meanwhile, provides opportunities to discover the wildlife that lives in the local area and identify ways in which it can be cared for.
There are also ideas for English learning focusing on instruction writing to give directions to local places and letter writing to communicate the changes the children would make to their local area, as well as cross-curricular maths investigations.
Through the Great Work which celebrates this learning, children teach others to care for local birds and they design and make their own bird feeders in DT, which links to the sustainability action for this enquiry.
