Primary teachers - help please

[geogteach]

Next week is 'geography week' in my sons school. As this is obviously my area of expertise I offered to help, DS's teacher has invited me in to talk to his reception class about being a flying doctor (his dad was when we lived in oz) in Australia (the country his class are studying).
Subject matter is not a problem but as i'm used to dealing with 11-18 years olds i'm at a loss how to pitch this.
How can I get over to them the size of the place, had thought of taking some props like a toy helicopter but are they too old for that? Help!

this sounds fantastic - good luck! I am secondary too, but on Saturday I did ds1's birthday party. Being the sad old cow that i am I wrote a "lesson plan" for all the games. I found that I really enjoyed it - the children were so responsive and open. I'd have thought they would love the props. I did a thing where I had some things in a bag and they were all desperate to put their hand in to pull something out and then think of a song that it reminded them of.

props sound great

can you do a comparison size thingy?
i do this when doing the planets......so mercury (not accurate here...brain is shot) is a golf ball and saturn is oh i dont know....

you get the idea...

could you do a scale thing to show how big oz is compared to britain?

how big IS oz compared to here

then maybe we can work out a scale thing

also kids love powerpoint

What a great thing to do!

I think props are vital when dealing with a Reception class that you don't know well. Certainly take the toy helicopter, and anything else you can think of to illustrate what you are talking about (got any antipodean soft toys, especially to give to someone who's sitting and listening really nicely etc etc?)

The size/scale thing is hard, as they will find this difficult to grasp. It's worth talking about time travelled in terms of their daily routine (eg. when talking about flying to Australia with FS kids we compared the time spent on the plane to getting up in the morning, then going to school, coming home, tea, bath, sleeping, getting up next day - still on the plane - and going to school again).

About to eat, but will try and think some more about it later....HTH

gladboags idea for time/scale is waaaay better than mine
my brain is stuck in KS2

I teach Yr1 ( with SEN) and would suggest
something as simple as a picture of a helecopter/ plane and a map, making it land on it pictures of where you go, e.g outback houses and maybe a stethescope(Sp?)will probably do!
maybe talk about if they have ever had a doctor / nurse come to the house ad how they got there, what would they think if the doctor had to come in a plane / helecopter?
can you get a recording of a radio call on the web?
HTH

They all watch koala brothers too I bet, so they have some idea.

Not a Teacher (yet- cutrrently at Uni) but used to doing things like this with Rainbow Guides. You could sit there for hours explaining something (eg, being an evacuee) and then someone would pipe up 'what, like on Dr who?' and then EVERYONE would get it.

These sound great - something to get my teeth into, keep the ideas coming!