Lesson video

Hello everybody.

My name is Mr. Robertson and I'm delighted to be learning with you today.

We are beginning a new unit of work and the big question that we are going to be investigating is about our local area.

We're going to be asking what needs changing, so this is a real opportunity to investigate your local area.

So for this we need to see, have we got our geography caps? Are we ready to put on are explorer rucksacks? Wonderful, by the end of this lesson, you will be able to use past and current sources of evidence to identify how you can investigate change in your local area.

We have some key words in this lesson.

I'm going to say the key words first and then I'd like you to repeat them for me.

So our first key word is inquiry.

Brilliant, historical map, fantastic, OS map, amazing and media, brilliant geographical vocabulary.

Let's find out what these words mean.

An inquiry is an investigation of a geographical question or issue.

Historical maps show what an area was like in the past.

OS maps are the official maps of Great Britain produced by the Ordinance Survey and the media comprises all the ways that lots of people receive their information, including television, radio, newspapers and the internet.

We're going to be using all of those keywords in our lesson today.

So in this lesson on change in a local area, we have two parts.

In the first part we're going to ask the question, what do we know about our local area? And in the second part we're going to use evidence to identify a local issue.

So are we ready? Let's go, this unit is all about investigating what future changes might benefit our local area.

Now before we could think about what future changes we might need to benefit the local area, we need to understand what our local area is currently like, how it's changed in the past and what it's like now.

As part of this lesson, you are going to be investigating your local area to find out a bit about what it was like in the past and what it's like now, and then with that information, you'll be able to design an investigation to think about what changes it might need in the future.

To help you understand this, we've developed a case study and the example local area we are looking at is Whitley Bay in the northeast of England.

Whitley Bay is a coastal town next to the North Sea.

In the photograph, you can see an aerial photograph, which is a view taken from above, perhaps from a drone or a satellite.

If you look carefully at this picture, can you see the golden sands of the beach? As well as that, there are lots of human features such as houses, shops and schools.

I wonder if you could spot where the schools might be in this photograph? Yes, perhaps it's where the areas of green are with the buildings in the middle where there might be some school buildings and some playing fields.

Because it's a coastal town in summer, it attracts lots of tourists who want to come and visit its amazing beaches and go to its great shops and attractions.

If you look at the map, you can see that there's lots of housing and this is known as residential land use, land that's used for buildings for people to live in, such as housing, flats, apartments.

We've also got other use such as shops, restaurants and attractions, and this is known as commercial land use.

So we have a mixture in Whitley Bay of residential land use and commercial land use.

You might want to investigate an aerial photograph of your local area.

What is the land use like where you are? Is it mainly residential and commercial or do you have other forms of land use as well? You might want to answer this question thinking about your local area.

I'm going to ask the question asking about Whitley Bay.

So what are the two main types of land use in Whitley Bay? Was it A, residential B, agricultural, C, industrial or D, commercial? Pause the video and have a think.

Excellent geographical thinking.

Yes, it was A, residential, lots of the land was used for people to live in, wasn't it? And D, commercial, because there were buildings for shops and other attractions.

What's the land use like in your local area? What are the two main types of land use where you live? Now Whitley Bay wasn't always a large town.

We can use historical maps to show how it has changed.

Look very carefully at this historical map of Whitley Bay.

What do you notice? How is it similar and how is it different to the Whitley Bay aerial photograph we looked at? Yes, you might have noticed that Whitley Bay is much smaller, isn't it? In the 1890s it was a village and it had a population of just 3000 people.

The settlement area was small, it was only 0.

83 kilometres squared.

If you look carefully you can see collections of houses and the word Whitley and just to the west of Whitley you can see the village of Monkseaton.

So it was just a small village on the coast.

Are you able to access some historical photographs of your local area? Are you able to look at what your local area looked like in the 1890s or a period of time about 100 years ago.

What was it like then? Was it the same size or was it smaller? Look at this photograph of Whitley Bay, this photograph is from the 1950s.

What do you notice has changed? You can see, can't you, that the village of Whitely Bay is now much larger.

Can you see how the village of Monkseaton is no longer separate but has become part of the overall area of Whitley Bay.

By 1951, census data tells us that it had 32,000 people living there.

In the 1890s there was only 3000, so it's 10 times as large, isn't it? And the settlement area had increased to 5.

2 kilometres squared.

So it's no longer a village, it is in fact a town.

I wonder if you looked at photographs of your local area from the 1950s, what has changed? What was the population in 1951 of your local area? How would you define it, is it a village? Is it a town, is it still part of a city? Today, Whitley Bay is a larger town with 36,866 people living there.

So it's now a large town.

It has an area of 7.

14 kilometres squared.

Look at the map, you can see that the town has expanded to the west and swallowed up the local villages around it.

What does your local area look like today? What is the current population of your local area? How has that changed over time? How about the area of your town or your village or the city where you live? Has your local area grown? Has it swallowed up any areas which used to be separate before? We're going to check our understanding now.

I'd like you to match the date to the correct map of Whitley Bay.

We have three different maps of Whitley Bay.

We have the dates 1890, 1950, and 2023.

Can you match the dates with the maps? If you have maps of your local area available, you might want to do the same exercise.

Pause the video, have a go.

Good thinking geographers.

So this map on the left was from 1950.

The little village of Whitley Bay was beginning to expand, wasn't it? In the middle we have the map from 2023 where we could see Whitley Bay is a large town and the final map, 1890 when it was a small village of 3000 people.

Well done if you managed to match those correctly and interesting if you managed to do a similar exercise with your local area.

So our practise task is we're going to be completing some sentence starters about your local area.

I'd like you to think about everything we've learned so far about what your local area was like in the past, how it's changed and how the land use is around your school nowadays.

Three sentence starters.

Today my local area is a, how would you describe it? Since the 1890s it has.

How has it changed since that time? Has it grown, has it declined, has it stayed the same? The land around our school is mainly, what is the land use around your school? Pause the video, have a go.

I'm really looking forward to some of your geographical investigating.

I've started to answer these questions using Whitley Bay as an example.

You might have some different answers for your local area.

Today, my local area is a town because Whitley Bay had grown from a village to a town.

Since the 1890s it has grown.

We saw in those historical maps didn't we, how the town had grown from a village to a large town.

The land around our school is mainly residential, meaning if you remember looking at the map, there was a lot of housing for different people and commercial because land was being used for shops and attractions.

You may have had some different answers depending on your local area.

I hope you've enjoyed exploring how your local area has changed.

In this second part of the lesson, we're going to think about using evidence to identify a local issue.

Are you ready, let's go.

So in this section, we're going to think about changes.

In the first part of the lesson, we looked at how your local area had changed in the past.

Now our inquiry is going to think about what needs changing in your local area today.

It's really important when you do this inquiry that you think about why things need to change and what reasons there might be for that.

For example, we want to make a decision about change, thinking about what we already know and what might improve it.

So if you live in an area which has only got a few shops and services, people will have to travel further to get what they need.

And so you might want to think about how we can help people by making some changes.

Jun says, I wish there were some local shops.

We have to catch a bus to our nearest shops.

So in Jun's local area, there aren't really any local shops.

If he wants to visit them, he has to get a bus.

So a change he might want to make is trying to encourage some local shops to open in his area.

Your local area might have different issues it needs to think about.

So what evidence might help us decide which issue to investigate? You've already done some thinking about how your local area has changed and now you know a little bit more about how the land is used and what it's like at the moment.

What evidence might we need to think about what issues we want to investigate? Use this time to talk to the person next to you.

Pause the video, have a think and see what ideas you can come up with.

I can hear some really interesting conversations going on there.

Well done for all your thinking.

You might have thought about looking at maps to see what issues might there be.

You might have thought of looking at news stories in a newspaper or online to see if any issues have happened recently, which you think, oh, that's an issue that needs changing.

You might think, I'd like to talk to some local people to find out what they think.

Have they got any issues with the local area and what suggestions might they have to improve them? You might want to do some field work.

You might want to walk around your local area, look at things like perhaps there's some litter on the floor or you notice that maybe the playground has got some broken equipment.

Field work can be a really good way of analysing and interpreting the evidence that you see.

Earlier in this lesson, we looked at some historical maps of your local area to see how things had changed in the past.

Using current OS maps, we can find some recent changes and that can be really useful for us to identify a local issue.

You try to use the most up-to-date OS map as they're updated every few years.

Once you've found your local OS map and you found the most recent one you can, can you see any local issues? This might be a chance to pause the video and look at your OS map now and see what evidence you can gather.

Another place that we can look for evidence of local issues is in news stories, newspapers, radio, local television and online news often report on issues affecting the local area, so you might be able to look for yourselves.

Do you have a local newspaper that you could find? If you haven't got a physical copy of it, is there an online version of it? Are there any local radio or television stories that you can find out? Is there a local newsletter in your area that would give you some information? We've got a headline here where locals are complaining about antisocial behaviour.

Maybe there's a news story about a part of your local area where litter is being dropped and making a real mess.

Maybe a local community centre has closed and that means that young people or older people don't have things to do.

Try and make some time now to do some research about issues that could be important in your local area.

Another really important source of evidence is local people.

Local people who've lived in the area often have lots of knowledge of things that have changed or of issues.

So for example, some young moms or dads might know that it's really hard to take their children to find a local toddler group because there isn't one nearby and they'd really like to have somewhere they could get together and meet and let their children play.

Older people might be worried about bus services that have stopped because it means they can't always get into to go shopping.

So local people are a really useful source of information.

You might want to think about how you might be able to talk to some local people in your area.

This person is saying, my area's improved recently because there's better street lighting and that's brilliant because people feel safer and they can see better when they go outside at night.

Field work is another really important way in which you can find evidence of recent changes.

For example, if you did a walk around your local area, you might notice that there's more litter that's been left behind recently.

Can you organise some field work in your local area to see what needs improving? This girl is saying there could be more zebra crossings to make it safer.

She did a walk in her local area and realised that people had to cross some quite busy roads to get to the local school and now her idea is if we had some Zebra crossings in, that would make it safer for parents taking their children to school and cars would slow down.

So let's check our understanding so far, thinking about what we've just been talking about.

Can you remember which evidence might help us to decide what to investigate? Think about the different sources of evidence that we've been thinking about.

Pause the video, talk to the person next to you, see what you can come up with, some brilliant geographical conversations going on there.

You might have come up with some of these.

Perhaps you thought about looking at some local maps.

Maybe you thought about researching some recent news stories on the internet or in a newspaper.

Maybe you thought about asking some local people what their opinion was or perhaps you thought about doing some field work, going out into the local area and investigating what might need changing.

Well done if you came up with those.

So let's pull all this learning together.

You are going to be doing an inquiry.

This is a really exciting part of geography.

Thinking about your local area, applying your geographical skills and really seeing what issues you can find.

You could use either some current maps, some local news stories, your own knowledge of the local area, and I want you to create a list of three issues that you could investigate.

So you're gonna need to spend some time doing some research, and once you've done this research, you need to create a list.

What three issues could you investigate? They've got to be things that are realistic that you can actually investigate for yourselves to find out more about them.

Off we go, then geographical investigators.

Let's do some research and come up with our list.

Pause the video, and off you go.

Wow, I could see how busy you've been researching, thinking, deciding what's most important and what a lot of different issues you've come up with.

You might have come up with some of these issues, perhaps near your school there's lots of traffic.

Cars are coming by on busy roads and not always stopping.

Perhaps there's been an increase of litter in your local area and you'd like to investigate that.

Perhaps you've been thinking about reducing the carbon footprint of your school.

We know that carbon emissions are really important in terms of climate change.

And you might have thought, what could we do as a school to reduce our carbon footprint? I'm sure you've come up with some brilliant ideas of your own which are really unique to your local area.

Thank you so much for taking part in this lesson.

Let's summarise what we've learned so far.

We've been thinking about change in a local area.

We've realised that a geographical inquiry develops existing geographical knowledge by examining evidence and gathering data in the field.

We've learned that previous studies of the local area are sources of evidence, but they can date quickly.

We've also learned that evidence for local area change can be found in historical maps and current OS maps, which are refreshed annually.

And finally, we've learned that evidence of recent change or local issues can also be found in the media, from local people and through field work.

Thank you ever so much for taking part in this lesson with me and I'm really looking forward to our next lesson where we develop more about thinking about our local area.

Until then, goodbye.