Please note: this resource pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum.

This is part of a set of subject areas also covering History, Science, and Art & Design.

See also Cross-curricular learning

Public spaces offer a range of opportunities for children's learning, and can enable children to investigate, observe, wonder, record and create.

The starting-point is the green man carvings often to be found on public buildings. Wikipedia has an entry for the Green Man with several images - see Green Man. Also ask Google Images for 'Kirtimukha' the Hindu green man. And you may have a local group of morris dancers!

You can also read about another variant on the green man, Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream, helped by a text-breaker. See also the text-breaker notes at the end of Reading documents.

There is also a pollution debate - is the area more polluted now than about 100 years ago?

Questioning and speaking and listening are at the heart of this material. It is based around two key questions:

• What is your local urban space like now, and how is it used?
• What was it like in the past, and how was it used then?

Much of this focuses on speaking and listening, as well as on reading and writing.