Barnaby Bear and the National Curriculum
Barnaby Bear in the National Curriculum (justification for including this site in planning)
About this site
I hope that this website will be useful in schools whilst studying the QCA unit 5, "Where in the world is Barnaby Bear", or similar units of your own. Although this unit is for KS1, I have included much material that is also suitable for KS2, after all, why should geography become boring just because you are older? For ease of use, there are links at the bottom of this page for different topics and places that can be found on this site.
Some of the material on this website is provided by children. In most of these cases the child has been acknowledged somewhere on that page (where parental permission has been granted). Photographs of children are only used with parental permission, and cannot be reproduced.
For my attempt at a legal disclaimer, copyright notices etc., please see my boring but necessary legal stuff page.
This site has been designed to be as child-friendly as possible, using large buttons for navigation, and themed colour schemes. The text sizes should suit the audience (specific KS2 material is smaller), and the majority of the site now conforms to web standards, making it inclusive and accessible to those using screen readers.
For Barnaby Bear's visit to Australia, PowerPoint or a PowerPoint reader is needed. I intend to make a web browser version of this as soon as possible, but am currently busy with dissertation writing, so please be patient. In the meantime, a free reader can be downloaded here.
Using the site
The site has maps of the areas Barnaby Bear and his friends have visited, to aid children with map skills. I have also included as many other geographical concepts as I am aware of at the moment (note the work in progress below). There is a site map to help you find where in the world Barnaby Bear has been. This will be updated soon. When the website has more content, the site map will made less cluttered and more easily navigatable, by either character or theme (e.g. Courage only, or all sea side locations.)
I have made the site as interactive as possible, without compromising download time. The 'interactiveness' should improve as I learn! Links (blue text) are to other pages, these should stay blue, so that many children can use the site on one class computer, without altering the link colour. Interactive features make something happen on the page when clicked. These are purple text, as below. If it is an interactive feature, an instruction box may appear, example, or a click may make an answer or hint appear. In some sections there are glossary links, which open the glossary page at the relevant letter. Glossary links therefore (for the most part) look like the usual links, but read "glossary" when hovered over. Some of the information in the glossaries will be more suitable for children at KS2.
On pages with music there is now a control bar so the music can be stopped, or the volume altered if headphones are considered unhygienic, or are not available.
I have recently started adding 'weather stickers' to city, county or country pages. This should enable you to bring weather and time comparisons into each topic as you teach. Maybe you could find a webcam if your class find it difficult to believe! More detailed climate information is available by clicking on the sticker. Thanks to the guys at Geography Forum for this useful idea!
Barnaby Bear and the National Curriculum
Barnaby Bear can be used in many parts of the National Curriculum - the books and big books can be used in the literacy hour, and in citizenship - the limits are as endless as your imagination. Barnaby Bear or other class 'pets' can also be used to encourage children to write a 'diary' for the pet after taking them home for the weekend (see TES 10/9/04). The justification below may help to show where the use of Barnaby Bear and this website can fit into the National Curriculum for geography (and, in some cases, other subjects)
It is hoped that this site will link ICT and geography. The main point of the site is to have fun whilst learning.
Parts of this website may be useful for studying history (Celts, and Prehistory). A visit to a victorian museum is also in the pipeline. There will also be a Cornish folklore tale (my own adaptation) with comprehension questions. KS2 children will be able to browse the site at their leisure, although you may want to select the parts of the site visited at KS1 to minimise confusion/keep them focused and on-topic.
About Barnaby Bear
Barnaby Bear can be bought from the Geographical Association website. Barnaby Bear also has big-books for your whole class teaching, and little books to go with them (good as guided readers). There is also a Barnaby Bear video and teachers resource pack available from the BBC.
There is more material available online by the BBC and by the students at The college of St. Mark and St. John
PLEASE NOTE:
If you are using windows XP, and have installed Service Pack 2, your Internet Explorer
may produce the following warning 
. This is
due to the interactive nature of the site, and without allowing the browser to allow blocked content, much of
the site will not be functional. As far as I am aware, this site does not contain any offensive or malicious
material, and it should be perfectly safe to allow the blocked content.
This site is a continuing work in progress. If you find any broken links or wrong information, please email me. Please also feel free to let me know if you have any additional information that would be good to include on this site, or would like a link to a similar site (I will vet this personally), or would like to see Barnaby Bear visit a particular area (I will do my best!).
Contributors to this website may find their links here. (If not please let me know!)
On pages with music there is now a control bar so the music can be stopped, or the volume altered if headphones are considered unhygienic, or are not available.
This site has been made for Internet Explorer 5.0 and newer. I hope to have it working in as many browsers as possible, but I am still new at this. I am aware of problems with layout, possibly to do with screen resolution or font size (in the viewer's browser). This may be solved by clicking on view »text size »medium. Although this will be of little help to those with a visual impairment, I am working to try to resolve this. If you are experiencing these problems and would like to be advised when they have been resolved, please email me and I will let you know. Thank you for your patience in this matter.
New!
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| Africa |
| Uganda: Barnaby Bear visits Salama, a small African village, and finds out about school life, jobs, and the physical geography of Uganda. Includes musical performances by a village school, photographs, maps and Ugandan arts and crafts. Great for a study of a distant location, and the children can really relate to different activities in the school day (and tries to avoid the 'pat on the head' approach to teaching about an undeveloped country). |
| Please note - not all of this part of the site is complete yet, but it is getting there! Look out for the source of the River Nile coming soon. |
| America: more suitable for KS2? - Barnaby Bear learns about North and Central America - it's weather, people income and physical geography. (NC 2a,c, 3a,c,f,g) |
| Barnaby Bear's Milwaukee diary |
| Barnaby Bear in Wisconsin
Some practise with maps and a little information about the state, and school transport! |
| Chicago
Barnaby Bear visited the tallest building. |
| Europe: |
| Rome: Barnaby Bear explores the ancient city of Rome |
| Lapland: Courage the dog visits Santa in Lapland |
| UK: (Clickable map of the UK - find out where Barnaby Bear and his friends have been) |
| Barnaby Bear visits Cornwall: The physical geography of Cornwall |
| Barnaby Bear on Bodmin Moor NC 2c - mapwork (esp keys) |
| Hills and Tors on the moor (Barnaby Bear climbs Brown Gelly) links to the history of the Celts below. Changes - what was this place like? How is this hill (and the views) changing, and why? Who lives / works nearby? |
| History - Bronze age c.1500BC. A little about the Bronze age, including photo's of hut circles and cairns, and how we lived then |
| Lakes - Dozmary pool under construction, but there's a nice photo of the lake here, to look at in the mean-time! |
| Rivers: The river Fowey. |
|
Barnaby Bear follows the River Fowey from it's source to it's mouth, investigating maps, and the different
environments that the river passes through on it's way.
These pages would link nicely with any contrasting environments work, environmental issues (balanced, I hope), or year 6 QCA unit 14 and year 5 unit 11. (As well as the obvious unit 5 for Barnaby Bear.) Great if you are looking for an excuse to teach a different theme this year! (As long as you discuss it with your geography coordinator of course.) I have tried to make this a learning experience for both KS1 and KS2. Planning ideas across the key stages (including foundation stage) can be downloaded from here with curriculum justifications. |
| Looe (Unit 4 - going to the seaside) Barnaby Bear visits a popular Cornish fishing town. Uses lots of associated vocabulary (NC 2a also describes what places are like NC3a) |
| St Georges Island - (Unit 3 - island homes) - not visited here yet! If anyone has photo's of their classroom 'friend' here, I would be most grateful as it would save me much time! |
| In Devon: |
| Plymouth (Science - the National Marine Aquarium) |
| A visit to a lifeboat station coming soon |
| Scilly Isles St Marys - may be good to go with Michael Morpurgos' books, or the film Why the Whales Came (will compliment QCA geography Unit 3 - Island Home) Barnaby Bear's Island tour is coming soon. |
| Downloadable materials that may be useful for teaching are available herefrom the Environmental Records Centrefor Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly |
| Scotland: Help Barnaby Bear to find out about Scottish towns, and learn about some of the geography special to Scotland. |
| Edinburgh (would go with the Barnaby Bear big book or programme - coming soon |
| Lake District: large map of the Lake District - Barnaby Bear discovers some basic information about it's geography |
| Keswick: Barnaby Bear thinks about what people do in Keswick |
| Derwentwater: Barnaby Bear visits Derwentwater Lake, goes on a trip on the 'boat-bus', explores some of the shore line and finds out what makes Derwentwater a special lake. Some mathematical problems here, (for KS2 you could calculate the rough volume of the lake...) and some mapwork, including identifying compass points. |
| Grassmere: Barnaby Bear discovers some of the Lake-land poets, visits a lake and uses it as inspiration for his own poems. Links to NLS - Year 2, term 3: riddles; Year 4 term 3: haiku, cinquain; Year 6 term 2: kennings, limericks, |
| Whinlatter Visitor Centre: Barnaby Bear finds out about Ospreys. Links to the Lake District Osprey Project |
