My street and my school
Geography · Early Years · The School
What is around you
Look out of a window and 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 — and noticing them is the first thing a geographer does.
The way to school
Talk through your journey: out of the door, left at the postbox, past the big tree, over the crossing. That is a ROUTE. Say it in order, because order is what makes directions work. Try describing it to someone who has never been.
A map is a picture from above
Imagine being a bird looking straight down. A table becomes a rectangle; a round rug becomes a circle. Draw your bedroom that way — bed, door, window — and you have made a map. Maps are not pictures of what things look like from the side; they are 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 see the cup's handle and the book's cover. Now stand on a chair and look straight down, and draw 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.