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F-6/7 Humanities and Social Sciences
The Australian Curriculum: F–6/7 HASS/Geography identifies the concepts of place, space, environment, interconnection, sustainability, scale and change as integral to the development of geographical understanding. These are high-level ideas or ways of thinking that can be applied across the subject to identify a question, guide an investigation, organise information, suggest an explanation or assist decision-making. These concepts also relate strongly to the food and fibre connection and are integrated with geographical inquiry and skills.
Geographical inquiry is a process by which students learn about and deepen their holistic understanding of their world. It involves individual or group investigations that start with geographical questions and proceed through the collection, evaluation, analysis and interpretation of information to the development of conclusions and proposals for actions. Inquiries may vary in scale and geographical context. Geographical skills are the techniques that geographers use in their investigations, both in fieldwork and in the classroom. Key skills developed through F–6/7 HASS/Geography in the Australian Curriculum include formulating a question and research plan, recording and representing data, using a variety of spatial technologies and communicating using appropriate geographical vocabulary and texts.
From Foundation to Year 10, students build on their understanding of place, space, environment, interconnection, sustainability and change and apply this understanding to a wide range of places and environments at the full range of scales, from local to global, and in a range of locations.
Foundation
Knowledge and understanding (Geography sub-strand)
Content description with elaborations:
The places people live in and belong to, their familiar features and why they are important to people (ACHASSK015)
- identifying the places they live in and belong to (for example, a neighbourhood, suburb, town or rural locality)
- describing the features of their own place and places they are familiar with or they are aware of (for example, places they have visited, places family members have come from, imaginary places in stories, or places featured on television)
- identifying how places provide people with their basic needs (for example, water, food and shelter) and why they should be looked after for the future
Year 1
Knowledge and understanding (Geography sub-strand)
Content descriptions with elaborations:
The natural, managed and constructed, features of places, their location, how they change and how they can be cared for (ACHASSK031)
- using observations of the local place to identify and describe natural features (for example, hills, rivers, native vegetation), managed features (for example, farms, parks, gardens, plantation forests) and constructed features (for example, roads, buildings) and locating them on a map
- using observations and/or photographs to identify changes in natural, managed and constructed features in their place (for example, recent erosion, revegetated areas, planted crops or new buildings)
- describing local features people look after (for example, a bushland, wetland, park, or heritage building), and finding out why and how these features need to be cared for, and who provides this care
The weather and seasons of places and the ways in which different cultural groups, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples, describe them (ACHASSK032)
- describing the daily and seasonal weather of their place by its rainfall, temperature, sunshine and wind, and comparing it with the weather of other places that they know or are aware of
Activities in the local place and reasons for their location (ACHASSK033)
- identifying the activities located in their place (for example, retailing, medical, educational, police, religious, office, recreational, farming, manufacturing, waste management activities), locating them on a pictorial map, and suggesting why they are located where they are