Teaching a new HSIE unit often means more preparation than simply reading through the lesson plan.
There are learning intentions to display, vocabulary to introduce, maps and globes to find and zoom to the right place, questions to discuss, and activities to explain to students.
If you're teaching Stage 2 HSIE – Climate and the World Around Us, these two free classroom-ready lessons show you what each lesson can look like when those elements are brought together into one student-friendly PowerPoint.
Two free HSIE lessons for Stage 2 – Unit 1 Climate and the World Around Us
These free lessons are the first two lessons of the complete Stage 2 HSIE Unit 1 – Climate and the World Around Us PowerPoint resource:
- Lesson 1 – Equator and Poles. Students revise the continents, oceans and hemispheres with a sticky-note map quiz, then build the difference between climate and environment through turn-and-talk discussion and photographs of beaches, deserts and snowy mountains. They turn a 3D globe to find the equator and the poles, learn why the equator is the hottest part of the world and the poles the coldest, and make a model globe from a ball, string and cotton wool before labelling an equator model globe to show what they know.
- Lesson 2 – Köppen Climate Classification. Students play the equator and poles game with movement actions, learn what it means to classify, and sort image and word cards in groups before a gallery walk. They meet the five Köppen climate zones – tropical, desert/dry, temperate, continental and polar – match each zone to its image and definition using movable cards, give peer feedback with sentence stems, and finish with climate zone corners, moving around the room to the zone each image shows.
The slides are designed to be displayed on your classroom screen and followed in lesson order, so you can move through the lesson without having to create a separate presentation yourself.
The free lessons use exactly the same style and structure as the complete unit and include:
- clear learning intentions and success criteria
- key language cards using the unit's own definitions
- explicit teaching content with the map, globe, image or video on screen
- every resource from the two lessons – the blank world map and quiz cards, the climate and environment photographs, the classifying cards and the Köppen matching set – shown large on its own slide, with a link from any slide that refers to it
- National Geographic MapMaker, the Sketchfab 3D globe and the hemispheres video already captured, each with a live link to open it on your own screen
- questions for class discussion, turn and talk and true-or-false thumbs
- numbered student tasks with instructions that stay on the screen
- click-to-reveal answers, hidden until you click
- a challenge task, a concluding reflection and an optional assessment in each lesson
They are designed for Stage 2 / Years 3–4 classrooms and are ready to open and use. The file is an editable PowerPoint with the fonts embedded, so it looks the same on any computer.
Want to try two lessons for free?
Download the free lessons below and look through the slides before deciding whether the complete unit would be useful for your class.
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Why use student-facing lesson slides?
A detailed teaching unit can provide excellent guidance for teachers, but it does not always provide everything needed to stand in front of a class and teach the lesson.
That is often where additional preparation begins.
Teachers may still need to:
- turn lesson information into student-friendly language
- create slides for the interactive whiteboard
- open the maps, globes and videos the lesson refers to and find the right place
- prepare vocabulary
- type discussion questions
- display activity instructions
- organise everything into the order it will be taught
Individually, these tasks may seem small. Together, they can take a significant amount of planning time.
The Primary Classroom lesson slides are designed to complete much of that preparation so teachers can focus more of their time on teaching and responding to their students.
What does the lesson look like in the classroom?
The slides are designed to support the teacher rather than replace the teacher.
Teachers can still:
- pause for discussion
- model ideas
- record student responses
- revisit previous learning
- clarify concepts
- differentiate activities
- adjust the pace of the lesson
The presentation simply provides a clear lesson sequence.
Students can see what they are learning, important vocabulary remains visible, questions are ready for discussion, answers stay hidden until you're ready to reveal them, and instructions can remain on the screen while students complete their work.
This makes the lesson easier for students to follow and reduces the amount of presentation preparation required before teaching.
Teaching Stage 2 HSIE: Climate and the World Around Us
The Climate and the World Around Us unit sits under the syllabus focus area Geographical information is used to understand climates and environments and addresses outcome HS2-GEO-01.
Students begin at the equator and the poles, then learn to classify the world's climates using the Köppen system and to identify climate zones on maps of the world and Australia. They go on to read choropleth, grid and relief maps, use compass directions and grid references, and investigate humidity and vegetation. In the later lessons they explore the deserts, forests, mountain ranges, rivers, volcanoes and ocean trenches that shape our environments, before collecting, displaying and comparing rainfall data across Australia and connecting rainfall patterns to the environments they create.
Visual material is particularly valuable in this unit because so much of the learning depends on reading geographical information. Students need to see the globe, the climate zone map, the photograph of the environment or the rainfall chart being discussed before they can compare it, classify it and explain how a place's location shapes its climate.
The PowerPoint slides therefore put the map, image or resource on the screen alongside the teaching content, rather than relying on large amounts of text.
Like the free lessons?
If the free lessons work well in your classroom, the complete Stage 2 HSIE Unit 1 – Climate and the World Around Us resource provides classroom-ready slides for the complete unit: all 16 lessons and 4 consolidation activities across 446 slides, with a linked contents page, more than 100 click-to-reveal answers, every resource card and map from the unit, and links to every website, map, game and video the unit uses.
The same lesson structure continues throughout the resource, allowing teachers to move from one lesson to the next without creating a new presentation each week.
VIEW THE COMPLETE STAGE 2 HSIE UNIT 1
More classroom-ready primary resources
The Primary Classroom creates practical, classroom-ready resources for primary teachers across HSIE, Science, PDHPE and Mathematics.
The focus is simple: clear resources for students, easy-to-use materials for teachers, and less unnecessary preparation.
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