Free Stage 3 HSIE Unit 1 Lessons – Connections and Country

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 to find and zoom to the right place, questions to discuss, and activities to explain to students.

If you're teaching Stage 3 HSIE – Connections and Country, 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.

Stage 3 HSIE Unit 1 Connections and Country classroom PowerPoint slide

Two free HSIE lessons for Stage 3 – Unit 1 Connections and Country

These free lessons are the first two lessons of the complete Stage 3 HSIE Unit 1 – Connections and Country PowerPoint resource:

Lesson 1 – Road maps. Students compare physical and political world maps, define what a road map is for, then use Google Maps to locate urban, rural and remote places in NSW – Bankstown, Grafton and Burren Junction – and identify the elements of a road map: key, symbols, scale, orientation and direction. A road map bingo game has groups locating hospitals, schools, airports and other services before comparing their boards and finding their own school on the map.
Lesson 2 – Transport infrastructure. Students compare the services available in Wollongong, their local area and a second location, then meet the terms freight and infrastructure. A land, sea or air categorisation game leads into the National Key Freight Routes map, where students read the legend, switch map layers and compare the freight map with a satellite view of NSW. The lesson finishes with freight scenarios – moving goods from Newcastle to Wagga Wagga, Sydney Airport to Broken Hill, Melbourne to Brisbane and more – a class anchor chart and an exit ticket.

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 or resource on screen
every resource from the two lessons – the bingo card, the infrastructure images and the freight route sheet – shown large on its own slide, with a link from any slide that refers to it
Google Maps and freight map views already captured and zoomed to the right place, each with a live link to open the map on your own screen
questions for class discussion and written reflection
numbered student tasks with instructions that stay on the screen
25 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 3 / Years 5–6 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 3 HSIE Unit 1 lessons for Years 5 and 6

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 and satellite images the lesson refers to and zoom them to 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 3 HSIE: Connections and Country

The Connections and Country unit sits under the syllabus focus area Geographical information is used to plan for sustainable futures and explores how places in Australia are connected, organised and managed.

Students begin with road maps and transport infrastructure, then learn how Aboriginal navigation practices such as Songlines connected places long before roads were built. They investigate how towns like Grafton are organised, compare the planned capital of Canberra with the regional town of Leeton, and research a town of their own. In the later lessons they examine how communities prepare for, respond to and recover from environmental events such as floods and bushfires, before exploring Cultural obligations to Country, Cultural Knowledges of fire and Aboriginal seasonal calendars.

Visual material is particularly valuable in this unit because so much of the learning depends on reading geographical information. Students need to see the road map, the freight route, the aerial image or the seasonal calendar being discussed before they can compare it, draw conclusions from it and explain how a place is connected or organised.

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.

Stage 3 geography classroom teaching slides

Like the free lessons?

If the free lessons work well in your classroom, the complete Stage 3 HSIE Unit 1 – Connections and Country resource provides classroom-ready slides for the complete unit: all 16 lessons and 4 consolidation activities across 528 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 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 3 HSIE UNIT 1