Year 6 Exemplars: Overview

Curriculum overview

The theme for Year 6 is: A diverse and connected world.

The diversity of the world, in terms of natural and built environments, wealth and poverty, and opportunity and inequity is a central theme of 21st century geography.

Interconnections are central to the ideas of geography. Interconnections between places need to be developed as soon as the idea of place has been established.

The ideas of global inequalities and interconnections are developed in these illustrations.

Interconnections are becoming increasingly important as goods, labour, money, ideas, and tourists increasingly move around the world. Global issues that occur far away often have a profound effect on the life of Australians. Wars, international tensions, financial disasters, natural disasters, production of certain goods, inequality of resources and wealth are just some of the issues which we cannot ignore.

About the illustrations

The illustrations use contrasting methods, but both aim directly at making students think critically and deeply.

Illustration 1: Using geography thought-provokers does this by presenting students with a question and a set of statements, all of which are factually correct, and asking them to choose those which are relevant to the question. It is best done in small groups to allow argument, justification and rethinking.

Illustration 2: Using your computer to discover an unequal world focuses on statistical data which indicates how unequal and diverse the nations of the world are. It introduces students to important statistical data about the diversity of population growth, health, wealth and education between nations. It starts with a limited range of data, and then encourages students to examine such statistics further by looking at two vivid websites which present differences and comparisons of national data in map form and in dynamic graph form.