Human and Physical Features
Geography · Year 1–Year 4
Sort forty features into made by people, or natural.
About the features
Two boxes and eight pictures: made by people, or natural. Drag each one in, and when they are all down the board says whether they are in the right box. Any card that is not in its own box is ringed, so a class can move it before anybody presses Show me.
Five boards. The coast has the sea, a cliff, a beach and a hill against a harbour, a port, a village and a lighthouse; inland has a mountain, a valley, a river and a forest against a farm, a city, a factory and a road. Then there are three climates a British class reads about and never stands in: a hot desert with a dune, an oasis, a canyon and a cave against a well, a dam, a quarry and a solar farm; a cold place with a glacier, an iceberg, a fjord and tundra against a research station, a ski lift, a wind turbine and a tunnel; and a rainforest with the canopy, a waterfall, a swamp and vines against a plantation, a sawmill, a bridge and a stilt house.
The pairs on those three boards are the best question in the tool: a canyon a river cut against a quarry people dug, an oasis against the lake behind a dam, a cave that formed against a tunnel that was bored, and the canopy that grew against a plantation planted in rows. Same rock, same trees, different answer.
Nothing is marked wrong. A card in the wrong box is answered with the reason it belongs in the other one: somebody built the harbour walls, and the waves cut the cliff out of the rock. That is a reason a Year 2 can use again on the next card, which is what a cross is not.
Every board is four and four, and both boxes are drawn big enough to hold all eight. Three in one and five in the other would let a class finish by counting rather than by looking, and the cards are handed out in an order with no more than two of a kind in a row, so there is never a run to drag across in one go.
The board waits until every card is down before it says anything. Answering as each one lands would let a class drop the lot in one box and read the answers off.
The coast and inland pictures are the same drawings as the landscape in the geography vocabulary tool, so the harbour on this card is the harbour on that board. The two tools are a pair: name the features, then sort them.
How to use it on your whiteboard
- 1Drag a picture from the tray into one of the two boxes.
- 2Drag a picture out of a box to move it, or press Start again to empty both.
- 3When all eight are down the board says whether they are in the right box, and rings any that are not.
- 4Press Coast, Inland, Desert, Cold or Jungle for another eight.
- 5Press Show me to sort them, for reading back rather than working out.
Questions
- What is a human feature?
- Something people built or made: a house, a farm, a harbour, a factory, a road. A physical feature is part of the natural world: a hill, a river, a beach, a forest. The words a KS1 class needs are on the cards.
- Is a farm natural or made by people?
- Made by people, and it is the card most classes argue about, which is why it is in here. The soil and the weather are natural; the fields, the fences and the buildings were put there, and a farm is those things.
- What about a forest somebody planted?
- A good question to have out loud, and the board takes the straightforward line: the trees grew, so a forest is natural. A plantation is a real exception and it is worth saying so to a class that raises it.
- Why is there no tap to place a picture?
- Because there are two boxes and a tap could not say which. Everything in this product taps where there is one place a thing can go and drags where there is a choice, and here the choice is the whole activity.