Free Stage 2 HSIE Unit 4 Lessons – Journeys and Voyages

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 historical sources to find, questions to discuss, and activities to explain to students.

If you're teaching Stage 2 HSIE – Journeys and Voyages, these three free classroom-ready lessons show you what each lesson can look like when those elements are brought together into one student-friendly PowerPoint.

Stage 2 HSIE Unit 4 Journeys and Voyages classroom PowerPoint slide

Three free Stage 2 HSIE Unit 4 lessons you can use in your classroom

These free lessons are the first three lessons of the complete Stage 2 HSIE Unit 4 – Journeys and Voyages PowerPoint resource:

Lesson 1 – Connecting with people and places. Students compare some of the earliest world maps, from the Babylonian Imago Mundi to the Cantino planisphere, and discuss why people set out to navigate the world.
Lesson 2 – Traditional navigation techniques. Students explore how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples navigated using star maps, songlines and marked trees long before European voyages.
Lesson 3 – Arnhem Land. Students investigate the Yolŋu People of Arnhem Land and the trade in trepang and tamarind seeds with Macassan visitors, using rock art, routes and oral stories as evidence.

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, source or video on screen
primary sources – maps, artworks, rock art and oral histories
questions for class discussion and think–pair–share
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

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.

Free Stage 2 HSIE Unit 4 lessons for Years 3 and 4

Want to try three 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
find the maps, artworks and journal extracts the lesson refers to
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: Journeys and Voyages

The Journeys and Voyages unit follows the great voyages of global navigation and the interactions that connected the Great Southern Land to the world.

Students begin with how early maps changed over time, move through the traditional wayfinding of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples, the Macassan trade with Arnhem Land and Polynesian navigation of the Pacific, then follow the navigators – Zheng He, Ibn Battuta, Columbus, Magellan, Janszoon, Hartog, Tasman, Cook, Flinders and Bungaree – before comparing the journeys and what each one connected.

Visual material is particularly valuable in this unit because so much of the learning depends on sources of evidence. Students need to see the map, the journal page, the artwork or the rock art being discussed before they can compare it, question it and use it to build a narrative of the past.

The PowerPoint slides therefore put the source on the screen alongside the teaching content, rather than relying on large amounts of text.

Stage 2 history and geography classroom teaching slides

Like the free lessons?

If the free lessons work well in your classroom, the complete Stage 2 HSIE Unit 4 – Journeys and Voyages resource provides classroom-ready slides for the complete unit: all 16 lessons and 4 consolidation activities across 419 slides, with 91 click-to-reveal answers and 61 linked sources.

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 4