Geography at key stages 1 and 2    (Year 3)

• Discuss with the class why people go on holiday, identifying weather as an important factor.
• Ask the children to identify places they have visited on holiday on a world map and globe, reporting on weather and leisure activities.

• Discuss with the children where hot and cold places tend to be located through discussion of holidays and atlas work, introducing the idea of climatic zones.

• Divide the children into small groups and ask them to decide where they will send a person with particular likes, dislikes and needs on holiday this summer. This could be someone they know or they could use profiles of fictitious people to ensure that a range of holidays, in terms of weather and climate, are considered. When each group has chosen a holiday destination, ask them to locate the place, using an atlas, and identify the climatic zone. Then ask them to mark, on a base map of the UK or world, the route from 'home' to the holiday destination and state the type of transport they would use. Information from all groups could be collated and transferred to a whole class display.

• Ask each group to research what their chosen holiday destination is like using selected information, which could include photographs, CD-ROMs, pictures from holiday brochures, atlases and general literature.
• Ask the children to use a prepared overlay keyboard file or a multimedia resource to find out about life in the chosen locality. Help the children to search the file for answers to enquiry questions that focus on the similarities and differences between their own locality and lifestyle and that in the chosen destination.

• Ask each group to write a list of what they would pack if they were visiting the chosen destination, taking weather and climate into consideration.

• Ask the children to imagine they are in the chosen destination and to write a postcard describing the range of weather conditions and leisure activities that depend on the weather that they experienced on holiday, eg visiting an indoor leisure pool on a wet day, going to the beach on a hot day, staying in the shade by a hotel pool on a very hot day. The postcards could be added to the whole class display.
• The activity may be extended for more able children by asking them to find out about weather conditions for particular days at the chosen destination, eg from newspapers or the internet, and to compare them with claims and climate graphs in travel brochures.

• Ask the children to start a 'passport' of places 'visited' during this unit. For each of the holiday destinations on the whole class display, ask children to fill in their passport, including information on: place, country, continent, climatic zone and other factual data such as population.