Lesson video

Hello and welcome.

I'm Mr. Hutchinson, and this is Geography.

We've been learning all about villages, towns, and cities, different settlement types, places where people live.

And I'm really glad to have you back in our lessons and to continue our learning together.

Hopefully you've had a chance to do the pre-lesson quiz so that you've reminded yourself of all those facts that you've already learned, ready to learn some more today.

And in today's lesson, we're going to be focusing on how cities and villages are different places to live in.

So villages and cities can be, can have some similarities.

There could be some similar things about living in a village or living in a city, but in other ways, there can be some differences as well.

There can be some differences of people even living within a village or within a city.

So, it can be a little bit tricky to try and get our head around those differences.

That's what we're going to spend some time thinking about today.

Our lesson will look a little bit like this.

First, we're going to consider some of the biggest types of settlements, mega cities.

Then we'll consider what life in a city might be like.

Then what life in a village might be like.

After that, you'll get a chance to think of some questions, once you've puzzled about life in a city and village.

And you'll finish with your end of lesson quiz.

So let's begin with mega cities, looking.

What do I mean when I say a mega city? Well, let me show you, first of all, a photo of a mega city.

Here's one here have a look at that.

That is a photo of Tokyo in Japan.

And Tokyo in Japan is an example of a mega city.

You can see all of those bright lights, all of those people, the huge buildings.

And cities are changing.

All settlements are changing all of the time as people move and buildings change.

Different settlement types are constantly developing and changing.

But cities in particular are really changing quite rapidly.

And one way that cities are changing, they're growing very rapidly, so they're growing in size.

And it can be difficult to measure a city somehow, because it's difficult to decide where's the boundary of the city.

Is it that road or is it that road? If there's a town sort of on the edge of a city, does that count as a city? And geographers agree and disagree about that.

And that's part of being a geographer, having those conversations to decide.

But in any case, cities are growing very quickly.

And the population, a number of people in cities is really growing.

And that's for a few different reasons.

One reason is, lots of people are moving to cities.

Lots and lots of people move into cities because there's lots of work in the cities, there's lots of services, and lots of different things that pull people into the city.

Then once people are in cities, they'll have families and that makes the population bigger as well because if one person moves to a city, meets another person and they decide, let's start a family, then that obviously grows the population bigger and bigger as they start to have children.

Now, once that population gets really large, once that population gets over 10 million people then we refer to that city as a mega city.

So, when a population of a city is over 10 million people, we refer to it as a mega city.

And there are several mega cities around the world.

Tokyo, the picture here, is just one of them.

Now, depending on how you measure it, Tokyo probably has about 25 million people.

London, on the other hand, the capital city of the United Kingdom has about 8 million people living in it.

So, London's not usually considered a mega city.

It's a very large city, but it's not quite a mega city yet.

Whereas Tokyo, as we can see here is a mega city.

So, let's see if you can remember some of the key facts here.

How do we usually define, how do geographers usually define a mega city? Is it when a city becomes the capital city of the country it's in? Is it when a city has a population of 10 million people or more? Is it when more people are moving into the city than moving out to the city? Or is it when a city gets its own mayor? Have a think and choose your answer.

You could either write it down or you could put your finger on the screen.

Ready, steady, B! It's when a city has a population of more than 10 million people.

Now, geographers because they're so clever they do use other measures as well they think about when deciding what counts as a mega city, and they might agree and disagree, but that population of 10 million is usually taken as a key factor, a key indicator.

So, let's look at some of those really large cities.

Let's take a look at the world.

And I'm going to show you a picture of the world by night.

This can be really helpful because if we look at the world by night then we can, the cities become very, very obvious.

And the mega cities, the really large cities become obvious because all of the lights are on at night, and so they shine really brightly.

So, get ready for me to show you this picture.

Here it is.

There's the world by night.

So, I'm going to get my red pointer out.

And let's begin by recapping some of our places.

So what's this continent here? Say that out loud.

What's this continent? Excellent, North America.

Say it, North America.

Usually appears on the left hand side of a map, but of course maps can be presented differently, but usually presented here, North America.

And below it, if this is North America, this continent here is? Excellent! South America.

What about this large continent here? Say it out loud.

Africa.

Good.

This continent here.

Europe.

Well done.

And what about this continent here? Excellent.

Asia.

And what about this continent down here? Australia.

Lovely.

There's one more to go where there aren't any permanent humans, or humans don't live permanently, haven't settled in this continent, which is this one at the bottom.

It looks really long and thin.

That's not really what this continent is like.

So, this is Antarctica and it's not really like that.

So, Antarctica is on the, on the bottom of the Earth.

So, it's kind of like a circle on the bottom of the Earth.

Covered in snow.

So, there's land underneath all that snow but it's covered in snow because it's so cold.

And in the winter it will expand, it will double in size as the sea around it freezes.

So, the land stays the same, but it looks as though the continent is getting much, much bigger.

And because it's so cold, we can't live there.

So, you won't see any lights there.

There's only a few sort of scientific research stations there that scientists will go and visit so they can study the continent, but nobody lives there forever.

However, if you look at the rest of the world, you see that there are places where people have settled because you can see those lights, those city lights.

So look at this map now and have a look, point to the biggest cities.

Where can you see the major cities? And you might even know the names of them.

You might even be able to pick out the names of them.

See how many you can pick out now.

You might want to pause the video so that you can do that.

Pause the video and pick out the major cities that you can see.

Excellent.

So, you may have spotted some of the bright lights.

For example, you might have spotted down here in South Africa there are some major cities here.

So, we've got Cape Town and Johannesburg, some major cities here.

In Nigeria we've got some major cities.

Across, over in Asia, in India we've got lots of major cities and some mega cities.

In the North here this is New Delhi.

This island here, that's all lit up very brightly is Japan.

And in Japan is Tokyo, that mega city that we already saw.

Just next to Japan is South Korea.

It looks like an island here, but there is actually land above it.

That's North Korea.

So, South Korea and North Korea, divided, two separate countries.

You can see South Korea has got lots of thriving cities whereas North Korea, doesn't.

Over in North Africa we can see around Egypt and around the river Nile there's lots of cities.

And in Saudi Arabia and the Arabian peninsula here, there are also lots of cities especially around the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.

Europe here, you can see there's lots of cities all across.

So, whereas in some of these other areas, there's one or two bright cities across the continent in Europe almost the whole continent is taken up by cities.

And there are some really bright ones, like Paris here and London in the United Kingdom where we live.

And then, of course, in North America, there are lots and lots of cities along the east coast here and along the west coast, especially.

And then in a lot of eastern, a lot of the east of the USA, the United States of America, the continent of North America, there are lots of cities, not so much in the Midwest.

In South America there are lots of major cities up here.

Then north of South America and across the east here, Rio de Janeiro.

And in Australia on the east coast here, some major cities and again on the west coast.

So, some of the biggest cities we can spot here, and you might know the names of some of them, Rio de Janeiro, New Delhi, Sydney, Canberra.

Tokyo.

And I'm sure that you'll want to do a little bit of research about some of these major mega cities and see if you can start to spot different cities around the world.

That's a really important skill to be able to see a map of the world and know where the major cities are.

And that's something that you can do as a little bit of homework.

But now that we've had a little look at cities, what about regions? Larger areas? So not just where are the city, not just which are the cities, but whereabout, what sort of regions or parts of the world have lots of cities, and which parts don't have lots of cities? And why do you think that might be? So take a moment again, to pause the video, look at the map and see which regions, which parts of the world have lots of cities and which don't.

Okay, excellent.

So, we've already looked at how Europe has lots and lots of cities.

The whole region here, the whole continent has lots of cities.

In Africa some parts of Africa have lots of cities, but other parts, there are no cities at all.

So why could that be? Why is it that in some parts of Africa, there are these huge cities and then other parts that aren't? Well, to understand that we need to think a little bit about the geography of Africa and the climate of Africa.

Because in the middle of Africa here, there's a huge desert called the Sahara Desert.

And the Sahara Desert is so hot that no cities can be built there.

No permanent settlements can be built there because it's just too hot for people to live there.

Similarly, if we look over to South America and this huge area here, this huge area here in South America has the Amazon rainforest.

And we can't build cities on the Amazon rainforest because that rainforest is too precious.

We need that rainforest.

In Australia over here, again, the climate is too hot.

There's lots of sort of desert, what they call the Bush, which makes it too hot to build cities there.

And so the physical geography of a region of the world can affect whether or not humans build cities.

So, as geographers now we're starting to see the difference between the physical sides of the world and the human sides of the world and how they interact with each other.

So, now that we've gone big, let's zoom in, okay? Let's zoom in to villages, to tiny little settlements.

We've seen where some of the mega cities around the world are.

Now let's zoom in and we're going to zoom back into the UK, where we live.

And we're going to think about what life in a village might be like.

And let's speak to two people that live in a village.

So here is Sam and Rinedi.

You can see that they're on their bike.

Say, hi, to Sam and Rinedi.

Hello, how are you? Sam and Rinedi live in this lovely little village in England.

You can see that there's sort of a church over here, small buildings, a little sort of high street down here.

Now, what does Sam and Rinedi say about life in a village? What do they say about what life, living in a village is like? They say, we love living in our village.

There is so much space and we can see wildlife and beautiful trees and flowers from our house.

We know lots of the people that we see out and about.

It is quiet and peaceful here.

We have to be dropped off at school and only go shopping once a week because it's half an hour away in the car.

We can't easily see some of our friends because they live in another village.

So you'll see that living in a village, there are some advantages, there are some things that are great and there are some disadvantages, some things that maybe aren't so good.

And they might be different for different people.

Different people might like different things.

Some people might like having lots and lots of crowded people around and buildings open all of the time.

And for other people, they might not like that.

So advantages and disadvantages are affected a little bit by the person, by what people think.

But you can see that Sam and Rinedi have made their preferences clear here.

So, let's write some of those down.

You're going to need to get your pen out, make sure you've got your pen and your paper there ready.

So I'm going to ask you to do a writing task now.

And this is your writing task.

What are the advantages and disadvantages, what do you think are the advantages and disadvantages of living in a village? And I've got a little bit of a structure for you here to help you write really well with good balance, geographical balance.

You might say, although, mm, it's also true that, mm, because you want to put an advantage and a disadvantage, and that's where the word, although, can help.

Although a good thing, although an advantage, it's also true that a disadvantage or although there's a disadvantage, it's also true that there's an advantage.

Although helps us with that opposite.

So, pause the video and write your best answer to that question.

What's the advantages and disadvantages of living in a village.

Super.

So, hopefully you've finished that task and you've written down your best answer.

I'm going to show you what I will have written, and you can look at yours and you can compare it with mine and you might want to improve yours, or you might want to tick it to say, yes, I got the same ideas.

This is what I wrote.

I wrote, although villages are near to the beautiful countryside, it's also true that it can take longer to get to friends and activities.

So, I've got an advantage there that it's near to the beautiful countryside, but also a disadvantage that it might take people quite long to get to their friends because villages are quite, villages can be quite sparsely, populated.

Different villages can be quite far away from each other.

So, that's a village.

What about life in a city? What's life like in a city? Well, let's speak to some children in a city.

This is Lyra and Abdullah.

Hello, Lyra and hello Abdullah.

What do Lyra and Abdullah think about living in a city.

Well, here's what they've got to say.

They say, we've always lived in the city and we love it.

We can walk to our school and there are lots of different shops and restaurants close by.

Our mum works in the centre of town and it takes her 15 minutes to get to work by bus.

It is so noisy in the city.

There are always lots of people around.

There's always something to do, like going to the museum or cinema, but it does feel quite crowded.

There are lots of cars too, which can make the air polluted.

So you might have already guessed what I'm going to ask you to do next.

There may be some advantages and some disadvantages.

So, what could the advantages and disadvantages of living in a city be said to be.

And the same structure there, so if you didn't quite get it last time, here's another chance for you to give that a go.

Use that, although there is, mm mm mm, it's also true that, mm mm mm.

To help you to compare those two different ideas.

Pause the video and give that a go now.

Awesome work.

You rock.

Well done for working so hard and writing to really balance ideas about life in a village and life in a city and how there are disadvantages to both.

There are similarities to both as well.

If you're living in a village, there might be lots of things that you do that's very similar to people that live in a city.

Maybe in the evening you like to watch your favourite TV show.

Well, if you live in a village or if you live in a city, you can do that in the same sort of way.

But there might be other things that are different.

So, what would I say about the advantages and disadvantages of living in a city based on what Lyra and Abdullah taught me? Well, I'd write something like this.

Although there is lots to do in the city it is also true that they can be crowded and noisy.

Okay.

So, now that you started to get an idea of villages and cities, and we haven't really talked about towns here.

Though towns can sort of be included on the outskirts of cities often, or just outside of cities, and maybe a sort of halfway between the two villages and cities.

We're going to focus on villages and cities for the rest of this lesson though, because I've got one more task for you, which is now that you've been thinking about these different settlement types, I bet you've got some questions.

And I'd love to hear what they are.

I'd love to give you a chance to think about them.

So this last part of the lesson is called, question time.

And it's your chance to write down some questions that you might ask of people living in different places.

So, first of all, let me show you this picture of this place here.

This is a beautiful city.

I want you to look at the picture and imagine that you knew somebody living there, that you knew a child living there, and you were given the opportunity to ask that child a question.

What is it like to live there? What sorts of questions would you ask? Make a list of all those different questions.

I might write to them: How many different schools are there near to where you live? Because it looks like there's so many people living close together that I bet there are lots of different schools to choose from.

So, I might ask them how many schools are there near to where you live.

Make a list of your questions now.

Pause the video and make a list of your questions that you would ask a child living in that city.

Great work.

Well done for writing those questions down.

I wonder what you asked.

I wonder what sort of things you were puzzled about.

And that curiosity is really important.

So, well done.

Let's now think about somebody living in a village.

So, new photo for you to have a look at.

Here, we've got a beautiful English village, maybe a quintessential village.

So, quintessential, when something is exactly gets the essence of something else.

And this is quintessentially English, quintessential English village.

It's got that, those little sort of narrow roads, old buildings, and just near to the countryside.

What would you ask somebody that lived there? If you knew a child, what might you ask them about life in a village? What questions would you want to know? Pause the video, make a list of all the questions that you would ask of somebody living in a village.

Amazing work, well done.

Working so hard, I'm really impressed with you.

And hopefully, now, you've been thinking really hard about the difference between living in a village and living in a city and how they can be different in some ways and similar in other ways, and how villages are changing and cities are changing, and there's advantages to both settlement types and disadvantages.

You've got a really, really rich understanding now of different settlement types and what it's like to live in them.

So, well done.

You've got much, much cleverer at it, and I'm really proud of you.

If you'd like to share some of the work that you've done, maybe some of those questions that you have been pondering about or any other work that you've done from this unit then you can share that on social media, by asking your parents to take a photo of it and put it onto social media.

Your parents or carers can share on Instagram or Facebook or Twitter, and they just need to tag @OakNational and #LearnwithOak.

And then your parents or carers will be able to put that up there.

And we'll do our best to give a response to that and have a read through.

So, well done.

Well done for sticking with these geography lessons and learning so much more about the world around us, both in terms of the human features and the physical features, the different places, the different locations.

Really, really impressed with your learning.

And I'll see you next time.