NSW Stage 1 HSIE Geography — Features of Places (Year 1-2)

NSW Stage 1 HSIE Geography — Features of Places

In the NSW Geography K-10 Syllabus (2015) — the syllabus current for K-6 in 2026, with the new HSIE K-6 (2024) syllabus mandatory from 2027 — Stage 1 Geography has two focus areas — Features of Places and People and Places — and most NSW primary schools split them across two years using a Year A / Year B cycle, drawing on the NSW Department of Education sample scope and sequence plans. The specific Year A / Year B mapping varies by school — check your school's HSIE scope and sequence. This guide is for the Stage 1 classroom teacher planning the Features of Places focus area for a Year 1, Year 2, or composite Year 1/2 class. It covers the Stage 1 Geography content for this focus area, a workable six-to-eight week sequence, the picture books and field-trip ideas that bring it to life, and the Aboriginal perspectives that should run through every lesson.

If you teach the Year B unit (People and Places), the hsie-resources-stage-1 overview page covers the full Stage 1 HSIE arc. The earlier unit, early-stage-1-geography-people-live-in-places, covers the Early Stage 1 prerequisites this unit builds on — students arrive in Year 1 already familiar with the idea of a place and the basic language of features and maps.

What Features of Places actually covers.

The Stage 1 Features of Places focus area asks Year 1 and Year 2 students to explore three big ideas:

• Natural and human features of places. Students name and describe features they can see — natural features (rivers, hills, beaches, native plants, native animals) and human features (buildings, roads, fences, parks). They start to use this distinction confidently by the end of the unit.
• The organisation and care of places. How places are looked after — by the people who live there, by councils, by the original custodians of the land. Why some places are cared for differently than others. What students themselves can do to look after the places they belong to.
• The impact of weather and seasons on places. How weather changes a place day to day. How the four seasons (and Aboriginal seasonal calendars) change a place across the year. How weather affects what people do.

The focus area is intentionally local — students start with the school grounds and their own suburb, then move outward to other Australian places they know about (a relative's farm, a holiday spot, a place they have read about in a picture book). The learning is concrete and observation-based, not abstract.

A workable six-to-eight week sequence.

A strong Stage 1 Features of Places sequence follows roughly the same arc most teachers use for Foundation HSIE — the known before the unknown, the concrete before the abstract.

Weeks 1-2: Our school as a place.

Walk the school grounds. Photograph natural features (the big tree on the boundary, the garden bed, the patch of grass where lizards live) and human features (the office, the canteen, the playground equipment, the fences). Build a class chart sorting features into natural and human. Some features will start a useful argument — is the school garden natural or human? Both, mostly. Don't shut the argument down; that disagreement is the learning.

Weeks 3-4: Our suburb as a place.

Class walking excursion (or a virtual tour using Google Street View if the school is on a busy road). Identify three natural and three human features of the local suburb. Discuss who looks after each one. For most NSW schools this is also where Aboriginal connections to Country come in explicitly — the suburb sits on the Country of a specific Aboriginal nation, and that nation has cared for these natural features for tens of thousands of years.

Weeks 5-6: Weather and seasons.

Daily weather observation chart for two weeks (temperature, cloud, rain, wind). Discuss how weather affects what students wear, do, and play with. Introduce the four seasons through a class wheel. Then introduce a local Aboriginal seasonal calendar — many First Nations groups use six or more seasons, and that disrupts the four-seasons assumption in a productive way for Year 1 and Year 2 thinkers. The Bureau of Meteorology hosts a number of these calendars on its Indigenous Weather Knowledge site.

Weeks 7-8: Caring for places.

Class action project. The strongest Stage 1 culminating task is a real piece of place-care — planting native species in the school garden, designing posters about putting rubbish in bins, writing letters to the council about a local issue students have noticed. Tie it back to the unit's central question: how do people care for places, and what can we do?

Picture books that work for Features of Places.

• Window by Jeannie Baker — wordless picture book showing a place changing across decades. Brilliant for natural-versus-human features and for weather across seasons. Year 1 students can spend an entire lesson on one spread.
• My Place by Nadia Wheatley and Donna Rawlins — works in Stage 1 (the recent spreads are accessible) for showing how a place changes over time.
• Big Rain Coming by Katrina Germein and Bronwyn Bancroft — a remote Aboriginal community waiting for rain; weather, place, and Country woven together.
• Welcome to Country by Aunty Joy Murphy and Lisa Kennedy — essential for the Country and Aboriginal-perspectives strand; works at every primary stage.
• The Lost Thing by Shaun Tan — a strange Year 2 read about belonging in a place; uses the natural-versus-human distinction implicitly.

For the broader HSIE picture, the hsie-resources-stage-1 and hsie-geography-resources guides cover the full primary HSIE arc and how Stage 1 Geography fits across History, Civics, and Geography content.

Mapping in Stage 1 — what students can actually do.

Stage 1 students can read and make simple maps with overhead-view perspective. By the end of Year 2, most students can draw a recognisable map of the classroom or playground, label natural and human features on it, and follow a simple route on a map made by someone else. The trick is starting concrete (their own desk drawn from above, then their bedroom, then a corner of the playground) and building outward. Avoid pre-printed blank maps for Stage 1 students to colour in — the act of drawing the map themselves is where the spatial thinking sits. Bird's-eye-view sketching, simple pictorial keys, and basic compass directions (north points to the top of the page) are all in scope by the end of Year 2.

Aboriginal perspectives and Country.

Every NSW HSIE unit is expected to include Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives, and Features of Places is one of the most natural units in which to do this. The land your school sits on is the Country of a specific Aboriginal nation. That nation has cared for the natural features of this place for tens of thousands of years. Local Aboriginal Education Consultative Group (AECG) representatives in NSW are often willing to come to a Year 1 or Year 2 class for a short visit — these relationships take time to build but pay off across the whole HSIE program. Daily Acknowledgement of Country, taught explicitly so students understand what the words mean rather than reciting them, sits naturally inside this unit.