River crossings

Topics Year 2/3
This unit is part of Mountains, Rivers and Coasts Rivers for People

Download all files

Objectives

Geography

Describe and understand the key aspects of human and physical geography including land use and rivers.
Use maps and atlases to locate and describe features studied.

Science

Set up simple, practical enquiries, comparative and fair tests.
Use results to draw simple conclusions, make predictions for new values, suggest improvements and raise further questions.

Lesson Planning

Learn about how people cross over rivers and about different bridge designs; test bridge strength and begin to understand how forces act on bridges.

Teaching Outcomes:

To understand the different ways people have found to cross over rivers and the challenges each presents.
To investigate the strength of different shaped bridges; developing skills of measuring, fair testing and collaboration.

Children will:

Understand the different ways people cross rivers.
Know how place names can be derived from river crossings.
Play a quiz game that will help them learn about some well known bridges.
Investigate the strength of different bridges, measuring variables and recording results.
Begin to understand the scientific forces that act on bridges.

Planning

Provided Resources

Bridges and other ways to cross a river
Task sheet

You Will Need

Plenty of books to make river banks
Sheets of A3 card
Multilink cubes

Weblinks

There are no weblinks needed for this session.