Going out

• Go outside (this can be in your garden, outside your front door or somewhere different for some exercise) at different times of the day or in different weather conditions. What similarities or differences can you find in terms of what you see, smell or hear depending on the time of day and weather conditions? Can you notice something ‘fantastic’ everyday?
• Can you challenge yourself to find five different routes to your house? You can use your local knowledge, Googlemaps or digimap. Each route should be planned to pass through different landmarks.
• Can you walk a different route each day with a member of your family? Which is your favourite route and why?
• Design Time! Can you design an interesting piece of street furniture that can fit somewhere in your local area? Some examples are, benches, streetlights, traffic lights, fountains.

What if… You could protect one place in your local area for ever? Where would it be? What would you protect and why? How would you protect it?

Design Time! Design a sign to hold up that gives everyone the message that this space should exist for eternity. You could dress up as a superhero and take a picture of yourself holding your sign up at that place!

Another fun activity to try! Keep a journal for 3 weeks. Can you write about the changes you have noticed outside every week? Has the weather changed? Are there more or less people outside?

Exploring my home

• Can you create an A-Z of your home by walking around the garden and your house to find something beginning with each letter of the alphabet?  
• Where is your house located and what might you find in the local area? Can you create a map of your house using leaves or sticks or anything else you can find in your garden or local area? You could even try with things you have in your bedroom like beads, bricks or counters.

What if… You could redesign the whole area around where you live? What would you change?

Use Digimap to find a map of your local area to redesign.

Explain why you have chosen to make the changes you would to your map in terms of physical and human geography. For example, ‘I would place this building next to the river, because…’

Mapping my home

• Can you visit every room in your house and order it according to size? You could even get the measuring tapes out and work out the size of each room with an adult! If your home was a country, which room would be the capital city and why?
• Can you create a plan view map of your house showing all of the rooms and maybe even the garden? You can use Lego bricks, recycled materials or just objects you can find around the house. Watch this video to see an example.
• Time for some Literacy! Listen to Anthony Browne’s book, ‘My Mum’. Can you create your own book named ‘My home’? Think of all the great things your home allows you to do and describe them, for example: ‘sleep like a log in my comfy bed and watch the rain trickle down the window pane.’

What if… You could make your home different. Can you make a video to explain what you might make bigger, smaller, add or replace?

My landscape

• Can you challenge yourself and create a scaled down landscape in your garden or outside space with physical features such as cliffs, rivers, mountains, forests etc. Label the features with descriptive language such a ‘wild river’ or ‘steep cliff’.
• Can you plan a route through your landscape for a character? Create a paper map of the landscape and include a key to show the main features.
• Time for some Literacy! Can you do some fun writing to describe your character’s journey including directions and description of the landscape your character is passing through? You might like your character to travel through a village or town to include more detail.

What if… You were asked to represent a space using a collection of items in your home. Use two egg boxes to collect items to represent your garden and home. How are the sets of items different?

My microclimate

• Can you explore your house and garden to find the place that is the most:

coldest, dampest, dullest, brightest, quietest, windiest, most sheltered, least sheltered, warmest, greenest, crowded, colourful

• Where would be the most suitable place for Barnaby Bear and his friend to camp in your garden? What will you have to think about?
• Design Time! Can you use the materials you have in your house or in your garden to design a home for Barnaby Bear and his friend? What will you have to think about when designing a home? What if the home is in a very hot or very cold place? What if the home is in an area that floods regularly?

A fun investigation to try! Can you challenge yourself and think about where the perfect place might be to plant some bulbs. They will need light, water, soil and maybe shelter. You could carry out an investigation by planting bulbs in different locations of your garden or in pots on various window ledges. What can you find out about the rate of growth?

My room

• List all the activities you do in your bedroom. What else could you do in this space? What if everything was taken out of your bedroom, what other activities could take place?
• Cover part of your bedroom floor with a blanket/sheet to create a landscape. Use anything else you have in your bedroom to add in human and physical features such as villages, towns, rivers, valleys, woodland, beaches, etc. Use a small figure/Lego toy to explore your landscape, what challenges would your character face if they travelled through your landscape? Why are they there? What are they doing? Who have they met? 
• Time for some Literacy! Use separate small squares of paper or post-it notes to write a sentence to describe each room in your house. Place the post-its/paper together in an order that flows well. Use these to write a poem about your house.

What if… You could make a ‘place capsule’. This is like a time capsule but tells the finder all about the place (room). What items would you place in the capsule to represent each room in your house?

Outside my window

• Look out of each of the windows in your house and decide which view you like the most and least. You can rank the view from each window. Does standing closer to the window or crouching and looking from a different height make a difference?
• Choose one window and create a field sketch of the view outside. This should be a ‘rough’ drawing annotated with labels that describe the human and physical features that can be seen.
• Time for some Maths! What shapes can you see outside? Can you pick out different lines: parallel, vertical, horizontal? Can you find any angles: obtuse, reflex, acute?

What if… You could change the view outside your bedroom window? What would you like to see each morning when you look outside? What smells and sounds might drift towards you and enter your bedroom?

Go back to the window that you thought had the worst view? What if you could enhance this view? What would you do?

Water in my home

• How do you use water at home? What is the best place to get wet in and around your home?
• Can you create different aspects of the water cycle around your home? For example, you could try the following: create condensation in the bathroom, evaporate water from a doorstep, driveway or washing line, recreate the sea in a bucket using some salt and mud, build a waterfall or an entire river in the garden or bath, make some mud and finger paint or make a mud mask, make some ice in the shape of something interesting. 
• Design Time! Design and make a rain gauge. Use it to plot how much water falls every week. Is there a link with this and how much plant growth there is in your garden or the area around your house? How would a water catcher be differently designed? Can you design a water filter that turns muddy water clear?

What if... it rained everyday? ....the wind never blew? ...there were no seasons? ...there was no sun? ...the weather was always the same? 

Choose one of the above questions. How would your home, garden and life change? Would there be more positive or negative differences?

Another fun and useful activity to try! Can you record how much water is used daily in your home? Think about how this water use could be reduced and the benefits of this.