Camden - Local Land Use

This week we have been looking at land use maps and making our own. Your local council website should have resources displaying this type of information for your local area. Links for Camden are at the bottom of the page.

First we talked about the different ways that land is used. The children were provided with pictures of different buildings and other types of land use to sort into groups. You can print out many pictures from Sparklebox or just Google images. They had categories such as shops, houses, factories, parks etc. I introduced new vocabulary such as residential, industry and infrastructure.

Next we discussed what land use maps show and examined a map from our local council. We talked about the reasons for different land use such as proximity to transport, raw materials, type of landscape etc. I explained that we were going to make a land use map of a small section of our local area. The children were provided with base maps and they decided the colours for their key. We went into town and walked around marking the various land use categories on our maps. We talked about reasons for the type of land use and changes that had happened in the past along with changes happening now.

Back at home the children used Photoshop to colour a base map to make a really professional looking map (top of page). We used the key to add photographs from the street to the correct locations.

We also used the council website to look at and compare transport maps, bushfire danger maps and flood maps.

Here are some links if you are studying Camden.:

Camden suburb maps
Camden Land Use maps
Camden flood map
Camden bushfire maps
Camden bus map