What do Five-Year-Olds Know of the World? — Geographical Understanding and Play in Young Children's Early Learning

Abstract

Young children bring a wide variety of developing geographical experience with them when they enter primary school. This article outlines various aspects of the nature, variety and extent of young children's geographical awareness, skills, knowledge, understanding, attitudes and values. It identifies children's environmental knowledge, the opportunities in, and limits to, their local and more travelled experience, concerns that inhibit greater freedom of movement and the role of play experience in their environmental learning. Children's spatial capabilities are examined and the distinction between using and making representations in and of the environment noted. This is linked, through reference to geographical aspects of the Foundation Stage curriculum in England, to the opportunities for geographically focused play that should be available to children in the early years of schooling. Several aspects of young children's play and its contexts are addressed to show how it can be used to encourage geographical experience and learning. The article concludes by noting that geographical learning should be referred to directly, and suggests relevant additions to the early curriculum requirements.

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