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Humanising Language Teaching
Year 2; Issue 5; September 2000

Lesson outlines

Mapping an ideal town - Primary

By Eleanor Watts, UK
Time: 1 1/2 hours
Ages: 8-13 years
Level: Intermediate
Materials :

a chalkboard or whiteboard
Focus:

1) Learning to make suggestions orally
(How about having a [factory] near the [railway]? Do you think the [factories] should be near the houses?)
2) Explaining decisions in writing
(I put my [schools] near the housing areas so that…)

In this final activity, your pupils create an imaginary map of an ideal town - first as a class, then individually. It involves a fairly good conceptual understanding of maps and the interdependence of places in a town. The children learn to choose between alternatives and weigh up the advantages of different town plans.

Preparation

Talk with your pupils about the settlement in which you live, discussing the layout of the town. Introduce vocabulary about key places - the shops, banks, post offices, factories, parks, leisure facilities, cinemas, hospitals, schools, etc. Do they think that these are well placed?

If possible, take your class on a walk around the locality of the school and provide photocopies of a street map for each child - so that they can follow the route. Discuss how the town could be improved as you go.

Write the above sentence structures on the board before the lesson.

Procedure

  1. On the board, plan an ideal town using the ideas of your pupils. Get different children to suggest (using the sentence structures on the board as a prop):
    a) the features they would like in their model town (e.g. shops, houses, a sports centre, factories, offices, a hospital, a bus station),
    b) where to put them (e.g. Should the shops be in the town centre or at the edge? Should the railway station be near the factories or near the houses?),
    c) why are they arranged that way (e.g. the students might not want the houses near the factories to avoid pollution or they might want houses to be near places of work).
  2. If the class change their minds about the location of a feature (the bus station for example), it can simply be rubbed out and drawn somewhere else.
  3. When the class map is complete, ask the children to make their own town plans and to justify their decisions in writing, using the sentence structure on the board if necessary.
  4. Display the plans and their rationales on a school pinboard where members of other classes can read them.

Comment

The class learn here that there are no right or wrong answers to planning a town. Often one has to choose between two evils. For example, factories pollute the air, but without factories, there would be few jobs for the people who live there.

Rationale

The creation of their own maps leads them to express a vision of the future. In addition, they learn that it is not enough to state an opinion. They also need to justify it.

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