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 location cards to find, questions to discuss, and activities to explain to students.
If you're teaching Stage 3 HSIE – Our World's Environments, 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.
Three free HSIE lessons for Stage 3 – Unit 4 Our World's Environments
These free lessons are the first three lessons of the complete Stage 3 HSIE Unit 4 – Our World's Environments PowerPoint resource:
- Lesson 1 – Tropical and polar environments. Students revise the Earth's axis and the Köppen Climate Classification (KCC) system, then meet the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn and the Arctic and Antarctic Circles and explain why the region between the tropics is hot and the polar regions are cold.
- Lesson 2 – The Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. Students read location cards for five tropical places – Sumatra, the Congo Basin, the Uraga region of Ethiopia, the Amazon Rainforest and Kerala – then use geographical clues to match each one to its letter on the mystery map.
- Lesson 3 – The Arctic and Antarctic Circles. Students repeat the investigation for five polar and subpolar places – Northeast Greenland, Varanger in Norway, Mawson Station, Macquarie Island and the Falkland Islands – and discuss why places at similar latitudes can still have different climates.
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 unit – world maps, the Köppen climate map, mystery maps, clue tables and location cards – shown large on its own slide, with a link from any slide that refers to it
- questions for class discussion and written reflection
- 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 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.
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.
You'll also receive occasional teaching ideas, free resources and updates from The Primary Classroom. Unsubscribe at any time.
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, climate graphs and satellite images 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 3 HSIE: Our World's Environments
The Our World's Environments unit sits under the syllabus focus area Geographical information is used to plan for sustainable futures and explores how people organise, rely on and change the world's environments.
Students begin with the world's climate zones and the major lines of latitude, move on to the relationship between climate and vegetation – comparing climate graphs and choropleth maps for places like the Amazon and the Ethiopian Highlands – then investigate how people rely on environments for food and materials. In the later lessons they use satellite images to examine how human activity has changed New Delhi, the Amazon Rainforest and Antarctica, before researching and presenting a global environment of their own choice.
Visual material is particularly valuable in this unit because so much of the learning depends on reading geographical information. Students need to see the choropleth map, the climate graph or the satellite image being discussed before they can compare it, draw conclusions from it and explain what has shaped an environment.
The PowerPoint slides therefore put the map, graph or image 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 3 HSIE Unit 4 – Our World's Environments resource provides classroom-ready slides for the complete unit: all 16 lessons and 4 consolidation activities across more than 540 slides, with a linked contents page, 40 click-to-reveal answers, every resource card and map from the unit, and links to every website 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 4
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.
If you'd like the free HSIE lessons, enter your details in the form above and they will be sent directly to your inbox.
The Primary Classroom