Geography Facts for Kids: Ask a class of Year 2 children how many continents there are, and most will get to seven. Ask them why Russia isn’t one, or why Greenland looks the same size as Africa on the classroom wall map, and the room goes quiet. That gap between naming the continents and understanding them is where most primary geography teaching either takes off or stalls. The UK National Curriculum asks KS1 pupils to name and locate the world’s seven continents and five oceans, then asks KS2 pupils to describe what those places are actually like and where they sit in relation to the Equator, the hemispheres and the Greenwich Meridian.
This guide covers the geography facts that matter for both stages. You’ll find what a continent actually is (and why the definition is looser than most children expect), the seven continents ranked by size with the numbers to back it up, how each one was discovered and named, how they formed from a single supercontinent, and why some countries teach five or six continents instead of seven. LearningMole is a UK educational platform producing curriculum-aligned video resources for primary schools, and this article follows the same progression we use across our geography content: build the picture first, then add the detail.
It’s written for KS1 and KS2 teachers planning geography units, parents helping with homework, and children who want more than a list of names. Some sections work as quick homework answers. Others go deep enough for a full lesson. There’s a continent scorecard table you can print, a key stage breakdown showing which facts suit which year group, and two activities that need almost no preparation. Jump to What Is a Continent?, The Seven Continents in Order of Size, Why Maps Can Fool You or Teaching the Continents to Children.
A continent is a large, continuous mass of land, and that vagueness is deliberate rather than sloppy. There is no minimum size, no requirement to be surrounded by water, and no international body that signs off on the list. Geographers work from convention and agreement, which is why the number of continents changes depending on which country’s classroom you’re standing in.
Children spot the problem straight away. Russia covers 17.1 million square kilometres, more than twice the size of Australia, and it isn’t a continent. Europe and Asia sit on one unbroken landmass, separated only by a mountain range, yet they are counted as two. Antarctica is ringed by ocean on every side, which is the textbook definition of an island, and nobody calls it one.
The honest answer, and the one worth giving to a curious Year 5 pupil, is that the seven-continent model is an agreement rather than a measurement. It reflects history, culture and habit as much as geology. Saying so out loud teaches children something useful about how knowledge gets made, and it beats pretending the categories are tidier than they are.
Islands belong to the nearest continent rather than floating outside the system. Greenland is the largest island on Earth at 2.17 million square kilometres and is counted as part of North America. The Philippines, made up of more than 7,600 islands, belongs to Asia. Madagascar sits about 400 kilometres off the east African coast and is considered African.
The exception is the scattering of islands across the Pacific, where the term Oceania does its work. More on that below.
Asia is the largest continent by a wide margin, covering roughly a third of Earth’s land area, and Australia is the smallest. The full order from largest to smallest runs Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Antarctica, Europe, and Australia. That sequence is worth memorising because it answers one of the most common homework questions on the topic and immediately corrects the assumption that Europe is a major landmass.
| Continent | Area (km²) | Share of Earth’s land | Population (approx.) | Highest point |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Asia | 44,579,000 | About 30% | 4.8 billion | Mount Everest, 8,849 m |
| Africa | 30,370,000 | About 20% | 1.5 billion | Mount Kilimanjaro, 5,895 m |
| North America | 24,709,000 | About 16% | 600 million | Denali, 6,190 m |
| South America | 17,840,000 | About 12% | 440 million | Aconcagua, 6,961 m |
| Antarctica | 14,200,000 | About 9% | 1,000 to 5,000 (seasonal) | Vinson Massif, 4,892 m |
| Europe | 10,180,000 | About 7% | 745 million | Mount Elbrus, 5,642 m |
| Australia | 7,690,000 | About 5% | 27 million | Mount Kosciuszko, 2,228 m |
Two things usually surprise children when they read down that table. Antarctica is bigger than Europe, which runs counter to the mental map most of them carry. And Asia has more people than all other continents combined, with roughly six in ten humans living there.
“Children can recite the seven continents long before they have any real sense of them. The shift happens when you give them something to compare, so Antarctica stops being a white shape at the bottom of the map and becomes a place twice the size of Australia with no countries in it.” , Michelle Connolly, Founder of LearningMole and former teacher with over 15 years of classroom experience
European explorers did not discover empty land. Every continent except Antarctica had people living on it for thousands of years before any ship arrived, and this is the single most important framing point when teaching the topic at KS2. What the voyages of the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries did was connect regions that had been unaware of each other, and they were usually followed by colonisation that caused lasting harm to the people already there.
With that established, the sequence itself is a strong story, and children follow it well.
Ancient Greek geographers divided the known world into two parts, Europe and Asia, because those were the regions they knew. North Africa was familiar to Greek and Roman traders, who used the name Libya for the northern stretch west of Egypt. The rest of the African continent stayed outside European awareness for centuries.
Serious European exploration of Africa began in the fifteenth century, driven by trade. The overland route east towards India crossed dangerous ground, so Portuguese sailors under the direction of Prince Henry worked their way down the Atlantic coast of Africa, looking for a sea route. Rounding the southern tip put them into the Indian Ocean and opened the passage later known as the Cape Route, named for the Cape of Good Hope in what is now South Africa. Through the sixteenth century, expeditions pushed inland, and the world map in European hands became three parts: Europe, Asia and Africa.
Christopher Columbus made four Atlantic crossings, in 1492, 1493, 1498 and 1502, convinced there was a western sea route to India. He never found one, and he never reached India.
On the first voyage, he made landfall in the Bahamas and then on several islands in the Caribbean, two of which he believed were China and Japan. He returned to Spain as a hero for reaching Asia. On the third voyage, on 1 August 1498, he reached the northern coast of South America at what is now Venezuela. He died in 1506, still searching.
Here is the correction most primary resources skip. Columbus never saw North America. He explored the Caribbean and touched South America, a genuine achievement, but the continent most children associate with his name was reached by others.
The Italian navigator John Cabot sailed west from Bristol in 1497 and made landfall on the north-east coast of what is now Canada. Giovanni da Verrazzano charted the eastern seaboard from present-day Florida up to Newfoundland in 1524. Those two voyages, followed by many others, opened North America to European mapping.
Around five hundred years before Columbus set sail, Norse seafarers reached North America. Leif Erikson, born in Iceland around the year 970, is generally credited as the first European to set foot there. His father, Erik the Red, had been outlawed from Iceland for manslaughter and founded the first European settlement in Greenland.
Two Icelandic sagas tell it differently. The Saga of Erik the Red has Leif blown off course while sailing home from Norway. The Saga of the Greenlanders has him sailing deliberately, after hearing of a coastline sighted by the merchant Bjarni Herjólfsson around 986. Herjólfsson saw land but never landed, making him the first European to see North America.
Either way, Leif and his crew reached what was probably Baffin Island, then sailed south past Labrador to Newfoundland, where they wintered. Archaeological remains at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland confirm a Norse settlement there.
A note on terms, because children mix these up. Norse generally describes the Scandinavian people of that period. Viking describes the seafaring raiders and traders among them. Most Norse people were farmers who never went raiding at all.
Roman geographers had long imagined a southern landmass they called Terra Australis Incognita, the unknown southern land, without any evidence for it.
The Dutch navigator Willem Janszoon reached it by accident. Captaining a ship called the Duyfken, he was sent east from the Dutch East Indies in 1605 to look for trade openings around New Guinea. He crossed the Arafura Sea, entered the Gulf of Carpentaria and made landfall on the Australian mainland in early 1606, near what is now Cape York. He assumed he was on a southern spur of New Guinea, met hostility from the Aboriginal people whose land it was, lost several crew members, and left.
More than a century and a half later, in 1770, Captain James Cook charted the entire eastern coast and claimed it for Britain. British ships began arriving in 1788. Australia became an independent federation in 1901.
Cook went in search of the southern continent on his second voyage and came closer than anyone before him. In January 1773, he crossed the Antarctic Circle and came within about 120 kilometres of the coast before pack ice turned him back. He crossed the Circle twice more and concluded a southern land existed without ever seeing it.
Roughly fifty years passed before anyone got closer. In January 1820, the Russian captain Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen sighted the Antarctic ice shelf, and three days later, the British captain Edward Bransfield sighted the continent. An American sealing expedition was in the same waters at the same time. Who saw it first is still disputed. The first confirmed landing came much later, in 1895.
The seven continents were once a single supercontinent, and they are still moving apart at roughly the speed at which your fingernails grow. That one sentence carries the whole concept, and it lands well with Year 5 and Year 6 pupils studying plate tectonics.
Earth has three main layers. The core, split into a solid inner and liquid outer section, reaches somewhere between 4,400°C and 6,000°C, comparable to the surface of the Sun. Above it sits the mantle, about 2,900 kilometres thick. On top is the crust, the thin outer skin of rock, ranging from roughly 5 kilometres thick under the oceans to 70 kilometres under mountain ranges.
The crust and the rigid upper part of the mantle together form the lithosphere, which is broken into pieces called tectonic plates. There are seven or eight major plates and about a dozen smaller ones.
Heat from the core drives convection currents in the mantle. Hotter, lighter rock rises, cools, and sinks again, over and over. That slow churning drags the plates along above it.
Where plates collide, one can be forced beneath the other in a process called subduction. The descending edge melts into magma, which rises and erupts as lava. Cooled lava becomes igneous rock, and over millions of years, those eruptions built volcanic islands that grew and merged into larger landmasses.
Pangaea gets all the attention, but geologists have identified evidence for several supercontinents before it. The proposed sequence runs Vaalbara, Ur, Kenorland, Columbia (also called Nuna), Rodinia, Pannotia and finally Pangaea. Vaalbara is thought to have formed around 3.6 billion years ago.
Pangaea assembled roughly 335 million years ago and began breaking apart around 175 million years ago. The fragments became the seven continents.
The German scientist Alfred Wegener published the theory of continental drift in 1912, proposing that the continents had once been joined. He assembled the evidence carefully.
Fossils of Mesosaurus, a freshwater reptile, turn up in both South America and southern Africa and nowhere else. A freshwater animal could not have crossed the Atlantic. Fossils of Glossopteris, a woody tree, appear across Australia, Antarctica, southern Africa, South America and India. The coastlines of South America and Africa fit together, and the rock formations match across the join.
The evidence was sound. The mechanism was missing. Wegener could not explain what force would move an entire continent, and he suggested Earth’s rotation, which was wrong. Most geologists rejected the theory in his lifetime. He died in 1930. Plate tectonics was confirmed in the 1950s, and continental drift was widely accepted through the 1960s, three decades after his death.
Plates currently move between about 2 and 5 centimetres per year, depending on location. At that rate, a plate travels 20 to 50 kilometres in a million years. Several geologists project that the continents will reassemble into a new supercontinent in roughly 200 to 250 million years, sometimes called Pangaea Proxima. The models disagree on its shape, which makes it a good prompt for a creative task rather than a fact to memorise.
The seven-continent model is taught in the UK, the USA, China, India and much of the English-speaking world, and it is not universal. Children with family in other countries often arrive at school having learned a different number, and being able to explain why is more useful than correcting them.
Japan, Russia, and several Eastern European countries teach a six-continent model that merges Europe and Asia into Eurasia, which is geologically defensible because they lie on a single landmass and share the Eurasian Plate.
France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Greece, Indonesia and others teach a different six-continent model that merges North and South America into a single America. The Olympic rings represent five inhabited continental regions, which is where the five-continent idea comes from. Africa, Australia, and Antarctica are treated as separate continents in each of these models.
Australia is a continent. Oceania is a broader region encompassing Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, and thousands of Pacific islands across about 8.5 million square kilometres and 14 countries.
The distinction matters because New Zealand is not part of the Australian landmass. Grouping it under Oceania solves the problem of where to put it. Oceania is not an eighth continent, since it contains Australia rather than sitting alongside it.
In 2017, a team of geologists published a case for New Zealand and New Caledonia being the exposed peaks of a continent called Zealandia, covering around 4.9 million square kilometres, of which roughly 94% lies beneath the Pacific.
They argued it meets the geological tests for continental status: being raised above the surrounding ocean floor, composed of continental rather than oceanic crust, and thick enough to qualify. Zealandia is not in the National Curriculum, and no UK exam expects it, which is exactly why it works so well in class. It gives children a live scientific argument to weigh rather than a settled fact to absorb, and it demonstrates that the definition of a continent is still being worked out.
The world map on most classroom walls makes countries near the poles look far larger than they are. This is the single most common geographical misconception in primary schools, and correcting it takes about ten minutes.
The Mercator projection was designed in 1569 for sea navigation, and it does that job brilliantly by keeping compass directions accurate. The trade-off is that it stretches the land as you move away from the Equator.
On a Mercator map, Greenland and Africa look roughly the same size. Africa is about fourteen times larger. Africa covers 30.37 million square kilometres, and Greenland covers 2.17 million. The same distortion makes Europe, Russia and Canada look bigger than they are, and shrinks countries near the Equator.
Alternative projections, such as the Gall-Peters, keep areas true and distort shapes instead. No flat map can preserve both, because you cannot flatten a sphere without stretching something. Showing children a globe and a Mercator map side by side makes the point faster than any explanation.
Lines of latitude run horizontally around the Earth, with the Equator at 0 degrees dividing the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. Longitude lines run vertically from pole to pole, with the Prime Meridian at zero degrees dividing the Eastern and Western Hemispheres.
The Prime Meridian runs through Greenwich in south-east London, which is a piece of UK geography worth pausing on. It was fixed there by international agreement in 1884, and Greenwich Mean Time became the reference point for clocks worldwide. KS2 pupils are expected to understand time zones, and the Greenwich connection gives British children a local hook into a global system.
Time zones follow from this. Asia spans eleven of them. North America spans 11 states, 9 of which are in the United States. Antarctica, where all the lines of longitude converge at a single point, uses whichever time zone each research station finds convenient, which produces nine different times on one continent.
Each continent has a distinct geographical character, and the sections below give the facts most useful for KS2 topic work: location, scale, climate and the features children are most likely to be asked about.
Asia sits entirely in the Northern Hemisphere, bordered by the Arctic Ocean to the north, the Pacific to the east and the Indian Ocean to the south. It is joined to Europe along the Ural Mountains and to Africa at the Sinai Peninsula, which the Suez Canal now cuts through.
Its climate range is the widest of any continent. Winter temperatures in Siberia drop to -30°C, while southern India passes 40°C in summer. There are 49 UN member states. China and India together hold about 60% of Asia’s population. The Yangtze is the longest river at 6,300 kilometres.
Landmarks children ask about: Mount Everest, the Great Wall of China at 21,196 kilometres, the Taj Mahal, and the Dead Sea, which is so salty that swimmers float without effort, and no fish survive in it.
Africa straddles the Equator, with land in both hemispheres, and covers about a fifth of the world’s land. It is bordered by the Mediterranean to the north, the Red Sea to the north-east, the Indian Ocean to the south-east and the Atlantic to the west.
The Sahara is the largest hot desert on Earth, at roughly 9.2 million square kilometres, spanning 10 countries. The name comes from the Arabic word for desert. Deserts are defined by lack of rainfall rather than heat, which is why Antarctica also counts as one. Sahara nights regularly drop below freezing.
There are 54 UN member states, more than any other continent. The Nile flows through eleven countries. Lake Victoria is the largest lake in Africa. The African elephant is the largest land mammal, and the cheetah is the fastest land animal, both of which are native to the continent.
North America runs from the Arctic to the tropics, which gives it polar conditions in northern Canada and Greenland and tropical rainfall in Central America and the Caribbean. It is bordered by the Arctic Ocean, the Atlantic and the Pacific.
It comes third by area at 24.71 million square kilometres. Canada is the largest country, followed by the United States. It joins South America at the Isthmus of Panama, about 80 kilometres wide at its narrowest. At the Bering Strait, it comes within 89 kilometres of Asia.
Features worth covering: the Great Lakes, the Mississippi River, the Grand Canyon and Greenland, the world’s largest island.
South America is dominated by two features: the Amazon and the Andes. The Amazon carries more water than any other river on Earth, and the surrounding rainforest holds a greater concentration of species than anywhere else. The Andes run the entire western length of the continent and form the world’s longest continental mountain range.
It covers 17.84 million square kilometres with twelve independent countries. Brazil is the largest by area and population. Most of the continent lies in the Southern Hemisphere, though five countries reach north of the Equator.
Antarctica holds more superlatives than any other continent. It is the coldest place on Earth, with winter temperatures in the interior below -60°C and a record low of -89.2°C at Vostok in July 1983. It is the windiest, with gusts approaching 320 km/h. It is the driest, receiving little more than 200 millimetres of precipitation a year at the coast and less inland. And it has the highest average elevation, around 2,500 metres.
The ice sheet averages 2.2 kilometres thick and reaches about 4.8 kilometres at its deepest. It holds roughly 70% of the world’s fresh water and about 90% of its ice. Under the ice, there are lakes, rivers and volcanoes, including the active Mount Erebus on Ross Island.
Antarctica has no countries and no indigenous population. The Antarctic Treaty of 1959 governs it, banning military activity, mining and nuclear waste disposal. About 1,000 people live at the research stations in winter and 5,000 in summer. Emperor, Adélie, chinstrap and king penguins live there, along with seals, albatrosses and whales. Studies estimate Antarctica has lost around three trillion tonnes of ice since the early 1990s.
Europe lies entirely in the Northern Hemisphere and covers only about 7% of the world’s land, less than a quarter of Asia’s area. The entire continent is smaller than Russia. It sits on the Eurasian Plate, shared with Asia.
There are 44 countries, 27 of them in the European Union. Russia is the largest, with about 40% of its territory in Europe, followed by Ukraine. Vatican City is the smallest country in Europe and the world at 0.44 square kilometres.
Southern Europe has a Mediterranean climate with hot, dry summers. The west is oceanic, cool and cloudy. The north gets genuinely cold, with Norwegian and Finnish winters around -6°C. The Volga is the longest river at 3,531 kilometres. The Alps run 1,200 kilometres across eight countries. Europe and Africa nearly touch at the Strait of Gibraltar, just 13 kilometres wide.
Australia is both a continent and a single country, which makes it unique. It is the smallest continent and the sixth-largest country, covering 7.69 million square kilometres in the Southern Hemisphere between the Indian and Pacific Oceans.
Roughly 18% of it is desert, spread across ten named deserts covering 1.37 million square kilometres. It is the second-driest continent after Antarctica, receiving under 500 millimetres of rain a year. Seasons run opposite to the UK: summer from December to February, winter from June to August. Canberra is the capital, not Sydney.
The Great Barrier Reef stretches 2,600 kilometres off the north-east coast, covers about 344,400 square kilometres and became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1981. It is the largest coral reef system on Earth and home to more than 9,000 named marine species, including six of the world’s seven sea turtle species.
Most continental names have uncertain origins, which is itself a useful thing for children to learn.
Europe may come from the Greek goddess Europa, from the Akkadian word erebu, meaning sunset, or from the Greek eurys and ops, meaning wide-gazing. Asia probably comes from the Akkadian asu, meaning sunrise, since it lay east of Greece. Africa is thought to derive from the Afri, a Berber people living in what is now Tunisia, with the Roman name for their land later spreading to the whole continent.
America was named by the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller, who chose to honour the Italian navigator Amerigo Vespucci rather than Columbus. Indigenous names existed long before: some peoples called North America Turtle Island, and Abya Yala, meaning “land of full maturity,” was used farther south.
Australia derives from the Latin terra australis, “southern land,” a name proposed by the English navigator Matthew Flinders in the early nineteenth century. Antarctica means “opposite the Bear,” from the Greek arktos, “bear,” referring to the Ursa Major constellation visible in the northern sky. The Arctic is named for the same constellation. Polar bears live in the Arctic and never in Antarctica, which is a distinction worth drilling, since children routinely put them in the wrong hemisphere.
Continent teaching works best when children handle, sort and build rather than label a worksheet. The two activities below need almost nothing beyond what’s already in a classroom or kitchen cupboard, and both are designed so the geography does the work rather than the craft.
| Key Stage | Curriculum requirement | Facts that fit |
|---|---|---|
| KS1 (Years 1 to 2) | Name and locate the world’s seven continents and five oceans | The seven names, largest and smallest, which continent is frozen, and which one the UK sits on |
| Lower KS2 (Years 3 to 4) | Locate countries and describe physical and human characteristics | Continent scorecard, climate zones, major rivers and mountains, the Equator |
| Upper KS2 (Years 5 to 6) | Latitude, longitude, hemispheres, the tropics, the Prime Meridian and time zones | Plate tectonics, Pangaea, map projections, the Greenwich Meridian, the six-continent models |
Give each group a paper suitcase outline and a continent. They pack it with six items: something to wear for the climate, an animal they’d hope to see, a landmark to visit, a food to try, a physical feature to photograph and one question they still have.
The last item is the one that teaches. Groups present their suitcase to the class, and the unanswered questions become the next lesson’s research task. It works from Year 2 upward, with older classes required to justify each choice from evidence.
Print or trace the seven continents onto a card and cut them out. Ask your child to fit South America against Africa and see how closely the coastlines match. That’s Wegener’s evidence, discovered at the kitchen table.
Then arrange the pieces into Pangaea, and back into today’s world map. Children who physically move the continents understand plate tectonics considerably faster than children who only see the diagram, and it takes about twenty minutes.
LearningMole produces curriculum-aligned video resources for primary schools across geography, science, maths and English. Our geography videos are built for whole-class teaching and independent work alike, with the visual demonstrations that make abstract concepts like plate movement and map projection concrete for children aged 4 to 11.
For teachers, ready-made resources cut planning time for topics like this one, where the facts are scattered across dozens of sources and need to be pulled together. For parents, the same videos work for homework support and holiday learning without needing any subject knowledge of your own. Founded by Michelle Connolly, a former primary teacher with over 15 years of classroom experience, LearningMole builds every resource around National Curriculum objectives while remaining adaptable for international schools following IB, Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence or the Welsh curriculum.
You can find related material in our geography resources hub, our world map printables, and our companion guide to the world’s five oceans. For classroom planning, see our KS2 geography teaching resources.
From largest to smallest: Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Antarctica, Europe, Australia. Asia covers about 44.6 million square kilometres, roughly 30% of Earth’s land. Australia is the smallest at 7.69 million square kilometres. The order surprises most children at the point where Antarctica comes in ahead of Europe, and that comparison is a useful way to fix the sequence in memory.
A continent is a large, continuous area of land, separated from others by ocean or by long-standing agreement. There is no minimum size and no official rule book. That’s why Russia, which is larger than Australia, isn’t a continent, and why Europe and Asia count as two despite sitting on one unbroken landmass. For KS1 children, “one of the seven big pieces of land on Earth” is enough. KS2 children can handle the fact that geographers don’t fully agree.
Australia is a continent. Oceania is the broader region that includes Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and thousands of Pacific islands, covering around 8.5 million square kilometres across 14 countries. Oceania isn’t an eighth continent, because it contains Australia rather than sitting beside it. The term exists because New Zealand and the Pacific islands don’t sit on the Australian landmass and need somewhere to belong.
All of these models are taught somewhere. The UK, the USA, China and India teach seven. Japan, Russia and much of eastern Europe teach six, merging Europe and Asia into Eurasia. France, Greece and several others teach six by merging the two Americas. The Olympic rings represent five inhabited regions. The number depends on convention, not measurement, and every model treats Africa, Australia and Antarctica as separate continents.
Zealandia. In 2017, geologists published evidence that New Zealand and New Caledonia are the exposed high points of a largely submerged continent covering about 4.9 million square kilometres, roughly 94% of it under the Pacific Ocean. It meets the geological criteria for continental crust. It is not part of the UK National Curriculum, and no exam requires it, which makes it a good discussion topic rather than a fact to learn.
The Mercator projection was designed in 1569 for navigation. It keeps compass bearings accurate but increasingly stretches the land as you move towards the poles. Africa is about 14 times the size of Greenland. Comparing a globe with a wall map is the quickest way to show children the distortion, and it opens a genuine critical-thinking discussion about how the tools we use shape what we believe.
Start physical and start small. Use a globe rather than a flat map, have the child find the UK first, then locate each continent by touch before naming it. Songs and mnemonics help with the sequence, and sorting animal or landmark cards onto the right continent gives repetition without a worksheet. LearningMole’s video resources support this stage with visual explanations pitched at a KS1 vocabulary level. Expect naming and locating at Year 2; the physical and human characteristics come later, in KS2.
The National Curriculum in England asks KS1 pupils to name and locate the world’s seven continents and five oceans. At KS2, the requirement expands to locating countries, describing physical and human characteristics, and understanding latitude and longitude, the hemispheres, the tropics, the polar circles, the Prime Meridian, and the time zones that follow from it. Plate tectonics typically appears in upper KS2 alongside volcanoes and earthquakes.
Geography at the primary level asks children to hold two things at once: the names and the meaning. The names come quickly. The meaning takes longer, and it arrives through comparison, through handling a globe, through discovering that the map on the wall has been lying about Greenland all along. Every one of the facts in this guide exists to serve that second job.
The seven continents we teach today are the product of both geology and human agreement. They formed from Pangaea over 175 million years, and they were sorted into seven categories by convention that different countries still disagree about. Both halves of that story belong in the classroom, because a child who knows the categories are debatable is doing geography, while a child who only knows the list is doing memorisation.
LearningMole produces curriculum-aligned videos and teaching resources covering geography and the rest of the primary curriculum, built by educators for UK classrooms and home learning. Browse our geography video collection to bring these topics to life for your class or your children, or subscribe for full library access to reach the complete set of resources across every primary subject.
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