NSW Stage 1 HSIE Geography — People and Places (Year 1-2)

NSW Stage 1 HSIE Geography — People and 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. People and Places is the second of those — paired with Features of Places across the Stage 1 program. Most NSW primary schools split the two focus areas across two years using a Year A / Year B cycle drawn from the NSW Department of Education sample scope and sequence plans, so a student moving through a straight Year 1 to Year 2 cohort gets one focus area in each year. 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 People and Places unit for a Year 1, Year 2, or composite Year 1/2 class.

The earlier Foundation unit, early-stage-1-geography-people-live-in-places, introduces students to the very idea of a place — home, school, suburb. By the time those students arrive in Year 1 or Year 2, they should be ready to extend that thinking out from the local to the national, and from a personal connection to a place to the broader connections that other people, including Aboriginal communities, hold with places across Australia.

What People and Places actually covers.

The Stage 1 People and Places focus area asks Year 1 and Year 2 students to explore:

• Australia at the national scale. What does Australia look like on a map? Where is the school, the suburb, the state in relation to the rest of the country? Students start to use a map of Australia confidently — naming states and territories, finding their own state, identifying major cities and natural features (rivers, mountain ranges, deserts).
• Connections people have with places. Why people visit some places. The connections families hold to places (a holiday spot, a relative's home town, a place a parent grew up in). The connections Aboriginal communities hold to specific Country.
• Accessibility — who can get to which places. What makes a place easy or hard to get to. Cars, public transport, distance, mobility. Why some places are accessible to most people and others are not.
• Aboriginal connections to places. The deep, ongoing connections of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to specific Country. This is woven through the unit, not bolted on as a single lesson.

The focus area moves outward from the personal — the places this student goes — to the national and to the perspective of others. That outward move is the conceptual core.

A workable six-to-eight week sequence.

Weeks 1-2: Australia on the map. Big class map of Australia, posted on the wall for the unit. Each student adds a sticker for their state. Identify and label the six states and two territories. Find the capital cities. Discuss what the map does not show — that the lines between states are political, not natural; that the names are mostly European; that Aboriginal nations and language groups have a different map of the same land.

Weeks 3-4: Personal connections to places.

Students bring in a photo or drawing of a place that matters to their family — a holiday spot, a relative's house, a place a parent or grandparent grew up in. Class share-time, plotted on the wall map. Most Stage 1 classes find that the connections cluster around the school suburb but stretch out to all sorts of unexpected places (a holiday house in another state, an overseas country a parent migrated from). Discussion: why does this place matter? What makes a place special?

Weeks 5-6: Aboriginal connections to Country.

Build on the Country acknowledgement students should already be doing daily. Read picture books that show Aboriginal connections to specific Country (recommendations below). Discuss why these connections are different from the personal connections in weeks 3-4 — they go back tens of thousands of years, they are tied to specific Country and specific stories, and they continue to shape relationships with Country today. The naidoc-week-activities and reconciliation-week-activities pages cover related Aboriginal-perspective content that pairs naturally with this phase.

Weeks 7-8: Why people visit places, and who can get there.

Reasons people travel to places — to visit family, for work, for holidays, to access services. Then the harder question: who can get to these places, and who can not? Distance, transport, mobility, cost. Most Stage 1 classes have at least one student whose family does not have a car, or who lives in a flat where public transport is the only option, or who has a family member with a disability that affects travel. This phase pulls those everyday realities into the curriculum.

Picture books that work for People and Places.

• Are We There Yet? by Alison Lester — a road-trip across Australia told as a child's diary; ideal for the Australia-on-the-map phase.
• My Place by Nadia Wheatley and Donna Rawlins — works in Stage 1 across the unit; the time-travel structure shows the same place changing across decades and across whose perspective is in the foreground.
• Welcome to Country by Aunty Joy Murphy and Lisa Kennedy — essential for the Aboriginal-Country phase at any stage.
• Big Rain Coming by Katrina Germein and Bronwyn Bancroft — a remote Aboriginal community waiting for rain; weather, place, and Country woven together.
• Possum Magic by Mem Fox and Julie Vivas — uses Australian places as a journey, accessible read-aloud for early Stage 1 students.
• The Lost Thing by Shaun Tan — a Year 2 read about belonging in a place; works well for the why does a place matter discussion.

Mapping skills in this unit.

Where the Features of Places focus area builds students' ability to draw maps of small local places (the playground, the classroom), People and Places extends mapping outward to the national scale. By the end of the unit most Stage 1 students can identify the six states and two territories on a map of Australia, find their own state, label the capital cities, and locate three or four well-known natural features (a major river, a mountain range, a desert region). They can use a simple pictorial key. They can follow basic compass directions (north points to the top of the page) and use up/down/left/right vocabulary on a map. The hsie-resources-stage-1 and hsie-geography-resources pages cover the broader HSIE arc and how Stage 1 mapping connects to Stage 2 and Stage 3 work.

Aboriginal perspectives across the whole unit.

This unit, more than almost any other Stage 1 HSIE unit, hinges on Aboriginal perspectives being woven through every phase rather than collapsed into one lesson. The map of Australia students post on the wall in Week 1 is a colonial map, with state borders and place names that are largely European. The same land, looked at through an Aboriginal-nations map, has a completely different organisation. Both maps are real. Showing students that early in the unit shifts the framing for everything that follows. Local Aboriginal Education Consultative Group (AECG) representatives in NSW are often willing to come to a Stage 1 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, sits naturally inside this unit.