Fieldwork in your local area
Geography · Key Stage 2 · The School
A question you can answer on foot
Fieldwork starts with a question your own street can answer. "Is the high street busier at the north end or the south?" "Where is the traffic loudest?" "How does land use change as you walk from the station outwards?" Each names a place, something measurable and a comparison. "What is my area like?" cannot be answered and so cannot be started.
Ways to record what you see
A SKETCH MAP is drawn on the spot: rough shapes, a north arrow, a key, labels. A TALLY counts things in a fixed time at a fixed place — cars, pedestrians, empty shops. A LAND USE SURVEY colours each building by what it is for. Photographs and a phone’s own sensors add to it. Whatever the method, record where and when, or the numbers cannot be compared later.
Presenting it without dressing it up
Turn tallies into a bar chart, put your readings onto the sketch map where they were taken, and write what you found in plain sentences. Include the results that did not fit your expectation — those are usually the interesting ones, and hiding them is the one thing that turns fieldwork into decoration. Say what you would measure next time and what went wrong.
Question: is this road busier at 8am than at 11am? Method: stand at one fixed point, count vehicles for exactly ten minutes, in both time slots, on the same day of the week, in similar weather. Record cars, vans, lorries and buses separately. Repeat on three days and take a mean. Now notice everything you fixed — the point, the length, the day, the categories. Change any one and the two counts are not comparable.