A Year 5 Geography & Global Citizenship Unit How will I inform my thinking and find teaching resources about `diversity’ through the topic of Mountains?

A Year 5 Geography & Global Citizenship Unit

How will I inform my thinking and find teaching resources about `diversity’ through the topic of Mountains?

Jon Waller, Dobcroft Junior School

• Existing planning: a physical geography based unit centering on and around the questions: What and where are mountains and what is it like in the mountains? The final project from this unit has always been a mountain fact-file booklet.

• RE has always been tied in to this unit linking Buddhism and the mainly Buddhist countries of the Himalayan region.

• ICT has traditionally been linked in through databases and the children creating and searching databases of British mountains.

My travels have taken me to mountains in Europe, South America and Oceania. However there is a lot of photographic resources in our current planning that come from the travels of my Y5 colleague to Tibet, Nepal and China.

The Geographical skills of this unit will be taught through hands on work in the locality.

Visits or Personal Experience

I Plan to use the story, Going to school in the mountains as a way into the unit and a way to start looking at similarities and differences between our own setting and the Himalayas.

I also plan to use a retelling of the true story of Mark Inglis and his assent of Everest.

A Story

I am currently finding it difficult to find anything truly useful in this area but continue to read the work of different charities such as the Himalayan trust, CAN and various Trekking charities. There are also charities based in South America for Bolivia and Peru such as Charity Bolivia and Project Peru that give information on the countries.

Most useful though has been the Oxfam education section, especially their publication on teaching controversial issues which I am hoping will shape my planning about Chinese occupation of Tibet.

I have also found several useful sites talking about interdependency which should prove useful.

National Geographic - global interdependency.• Civworld.org - youth summit on interdependency.• www.globalsouth - independent e-journal on interdependency

Using the work of influential Charities or NGOs

Newsround have several stories about the Olympic torch marches, that I hope to use when looking into the Tibet and China debate.Newspapers were obviously full of stories around these marches but there were also a couple more recent interesting stories from the Guardian regarding climate change and it impact on Tibetan farmers and the current stance of Tibetan Monks towards Chinese occupation.

In The News

I am planning to use Video fairly extensivelythroughout the unit.

BBC broadband clips have a great selection ofmountain based video but clip 10565 whichshows images of the Chinese and TibetanSections of the Himalayas will be used tostimulate the children’s curiosity and theywill begin to generate questions thatarise from watching it.

I plan on using several sections of the BBC Human Planet seriesas well but particularly a scene called ‘no normal commute’which follows the extraordinary journey to school for twochildren and their father down a glacier.

There is another BBC clip 329 tourism in the mountains, which Iplan to use alongside the story of Mark Inglis as the Basis of aP4C enquiry.

The Documentary Cry of the Snow leopard has also helpedshape my own thinking.

Helen also recommended one of ‘what makes me happy’ scenesas a possible resource, I still need to check this out.

Part of our field work is going to involve the children working with cameras in their own locality.

We have an extensive photo collection from my colleague’s travels.

I am searching for appropriate positive and negative images of Chinese occupation (see The Danger of a Single Story.

I have watched and read plenty of resources to broaden my understanding of the mountains and life in the mountains which will obviously prove vital when it comes to teaching some of the complex issues I plan to cover.

However I have really struggled to find useful, child friendly resources and any input from the group would be much appreciated.

You can read how the unit developed on our class blog.

http://mountainsandtheglobaldimension.wordpress.com/2012/03/09/an-introduction/