Why you should teach a topic on the Amazon at Upper KS2

This is the first in a new series of blogs on developing the wider curriculum. I have selected several topics that I believe there are excellent reasons for including in the curriculum for particular year groups or phases, and will outline the National Curriculum objectives that can be taught through each topic and how it can be used to build on children’s prior knowledge. For schools who teach cross-curricular topics, I will also suggest some meaningful links to other subjects.

Before I start, I’d like to say that there are many ways for schools to deliver the National Curriculum, so please don’t worry if your school doesn’t teach these topics in the way I’m describing. I’m definitely not saying there’s anything wrong with your school’s curriculum if you don’t, just giving some examples of how topics can be planned as part of a coherent and well-sequenced curriculum. Also, there are many different ways to approach each topic, dependent on what the children have already learnt. Just because I haven’t included a particular aspect doesn’t mean it isn’t valuable, and those I have chosen to include may not all be relevant for you, depending on your context.

So onto the main purpose of the blog – explaining why I think the Amazon is a valuable topic to teach in UKS2.

First I’m going to outline which National Curriculum objectives can be addressed through the topic. They are mainly from the geography curriculum, but there are lots of opportunities for science within this topic too.

Place and locational knowledge

Many schools will have selected the Amazon as the region within North or South America they use to cover the place knowledge objective:

• understand geographical similarities and differences through the study of human and physical geography of a region of the United Kingdom, a region in a European country, and a region within North or South America

This implies an element of comparison with the geography of the UK; for effective comparison it’s important to compare similar places. For example, comparing the Amazon rainforest with a temperate forest in the UK, or comparing a city such as Manaus (capital of the Brazilian state of Amazonia) with a city in the UK.

It’s worth noting that this objective specifies the study of both human and physical geography, so it’s important to know which specific aspects of each you intend to include. The characteristics included in the National Curriculum are:

• physical geography: climate zones, biomes and vegetation belts, rivers, mountains, volcanoes and earthquakes, and the water cycle
• human geography: types of settlement and land use, economic activity including trade links, and the distribution of natural resources including energy, food, minerals and water

Additionally, there’s an opportunity to focus on the countries in South America, particularly as there are nine different countries within the Amazon basin. A quick activity labelling countries and capitals on a map of South America could be done regularly throughout the unit to help children remember them in the long term.

• locate the world’s countries, using maps to focus on Europe (including the location of Russia) and North and South America, concentrating on their environmental regions, key physical and human characteristics, countries, and major cities

Physical geography

Clearly one of the key elements of the topic is learning about the features of the tropical climate zone, the tropical rainforest biome and the Amazon rainforest as a vegetation belt. If children have not already studied climate zones and biomes, it will be important to start with an overview of these before focusing specifically on the Amazon rainforest. Since lines of latitude are a key factor in determing a region’s climate, the following objective should also be taught when learning about climate zones:

• identify the position and significance of latitude, longitude, Equator, Northern Hemisphere, Southern Hemisphere, the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, Arctic and Antarctic Circle, the Prime/Greenwich Meridian and time zones (including day and night)

If your children have already learnt about lines of latitude and longitude, this topic is a good opportunity to consolidate that knowledge. It also builds on knowledge of hot and cold areas of the world learnt in KS1.

A good opportunity for including fieldwork would be to look at the weather patterns and soil types in the Amazon rainforest, and compare these with those in the local area. Types of plant, soil and weather patterns are key to classifying vegetation belts (really useful article on this here https://www.nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/vegetation-region/ ), so these could be used for comparison with a local forest as well. This would be a good opportunity to consolidate children’s learning about seasonal and daily weather patterns and physical geography (soil, vegetation, weather) from KS1, as well as soils in Year 3 science.

As children will have already learnt about the water cycle in Year 4, they should build on this knowledge by learning about how rainforests help maintain the water cycle, and how the warm temperatures, leading to faster evaporation of water, contribute to the high levels of rainfall.

Finally, there’s an opportunity to build on children’s prior learning about rivers (assuming this has been taught in Lower KS2) by learning some key facts about the River Amazon, and identifying its features on maps and aerial photographs. Since the source of the Amazon is in the Andes, learning about this mountain range would be a useful additional example either to consolidate knowledge of mountains, or to prepare children for learning about mountains later in the key stage. Both the River Amazon and the Andes could be compared with previously studied examples of rivers and mountain ranges.

Human Geography

All of the aspects of human geography specified in the National Curriculum would be addressed by teaching children about the variety of threats to the Amazon rainforest, the reasons for these threats and the impact they have on the area. These include cattle and soy farming (economic activity), dams created to generate hydropower (energy), gold mining, oil exploration, logging and overharvesting of fish (distribution of natural resources and economic activity). I highly recommend taking a look at the WWF’s overview of the threats to the Amazon for a comprehensive explanation of these issues. https://www.worldwildlife.org/places/amazon Deforestation could also affect water supply in Brazilian cities, and possibly further afield. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2018/11/how-cutting-the-amazon-forest-could-affect-weather/ All of these issues contribute to debates about how land should be used in the Amazon (land use).

Exploring the effects of deforestation and other human activity which is having a negative impact on the rainforest provides an opportunity for children to understand how physical and human features are interconnected – one of the aims of the geography National Curriculum (see the purpose of study and aims section at the beginning of the document).

Additionally, learning about the lives of indigenous tribes in the Amazon provides an opportunity for children to compare different types of settlement, as well as broadening their understanding of other cultures.

The reason that I specifically state that this topic should be taught in Upper KS2, is partly that it builds on what children will have learnt in Lower KS2 about rivers and the water cycle (and potentially climate zones and biomes). Also, in Upper KS2 children will have come across more examples of settlements, industry, trade and use of natural resources, so they will be more able to work with these concepts in order to fully understand the environmental issues involved in learning about threats to the rainforest.

Links to science

In Year 4, children learn about how environments can change and that this can sometimes pose dangers to living things. If this is initially taught using local examples, learning about the effects of the various threats to the rainforest on the plants and animals that live there would be a useful opportunity to consolidate their learning on this subject. This also builds on KS1 science about how habitats provide for the basic needs of different animals and plants, and how they depend on each other.

Depending on whether the Amazon topic is taught before or after Year 6 science on evolution and inheritance, it could be used either as a useful opportunity to prepare children for learning about how animals and plants are adapted to suit their environment or a way of consolidating their learning with additional examples. The differences between the plants and animals found in the different layers of the rainforest is a good example of adaptation to habitat; an interesting extension to this could be learning about cloud forests and how the types of plants change at different altitudes.

There are opportunities for links with a variety of other science objectives, depending on your school’s curriculum and the needs of the children:

• requirements for plant growth (Year 3 objective – children often continue to believe that plants need soil to grow after learning about this in Year 3, so learning about epiphytic rainforest plants is a good way of challenging this misconception)
• food chains, grouping animals and using classification keys (consolidation of Year 4 objectives)
• changes of state – evaporation and condensation (building on learning about this in Year 4 by investigating the role of the water cycle in creating the humid climate in the rainforest)
• plant and animal lifecycles (Year 5)
• classification of plants and animals (Year 6)

Cross-curricular opportunities

Of course there are lots of possible cross-curricular links to the rainforest, but these are the ones that I personally feel are most meaningful and that I have enjoyed teaching myself.

There are so many fantastic texts linked to the rainforest (I’m a big fan of The Great Kapok Tree) that I’m not going to list them all here. However, one that is less well-known, which I have really enjoyed using, is Traditional Stories from the Amazon by Saviour Pirotta. This is a lovely collection of stories with good language and structures that are challenging for UKS2 children to emulate. If your school teaches Greek and/or Roman myths, it would be interesting to compare those they have already read with these myths from a different continent.

Another reason that my personal preference would be for this topic to be placed in Upper KS2 is that it’s an ideal opportunity for discussion writing about the environmental issues involved. Older children should be able to produce some really high quality writing once they have developed a good understanding of these issues.

Similarly there are loads of great art opportunities, but a personal favourite is learning about and responding to the jungle paintings of Henri Rousseau. It’s important to note that Rousseau had never left France or seen a jungle, but I think that provides some interesting opportunities for discussion about whether it’s important for art to be realistic, as well as for comparing his paintings with photographs of the rainforest. Children could use observational drawings of rainforest plants to create their own pieces using stylised versions of these plants. Creating a good piece that consists mainly of foliage requires some quite sophisticated use of colour and line and careful thought about how to approach the composition so that it’s not just a page of green, which is a good challenge for older children.