Hot and cold places word bank for KS1 and KS2

The KS1 geography statement asks children to locate hot and cold areas of the world in relation to the Equator and the North and South Poles. That means the most important words on the mat are the location words: Arctic, Antarctica, equator. Teach them with a globe, not just a flat map. Put a sticker on the UK, then let children run a finger up to the North Pole, down to the equator and on to the South Pole. The pattern they discover, that it gets hotter towards the middle and colder towards the top and bottom, is the whole topic in one movement.

The same statement starts with seasonal and daily weather in the UK, so begin at home. A week of weather charts gives children words like sunny, windy and cold from their own experience before they meet blizzard and climate in places they have never been.

The most common misconception in this topic is that penguins and polar bears live together. They never meet in the wild: polar bears live in the Arctic, in the far north, and almost all penguins live in the southern half of the world, including Antarctica. A story can put this right: a penguin chick and a polar bear cub, each lost at the wrong end of the world, travel past the equator to get home.

A useful sorting activity is two hoops labelled Arctic and Antarctica, with picture cards of animals to place. Then add a third hoop for hot places near the equator and sort camels, lizards and parrots into it. Children practise the nouns and the location words together.

In Years 3 and 4 the topic often widens into biomes and climate zones, and pupils need words that explain rather than describe. Adapt and insulate are the key verbs: a polar bear is adapted to the cold, and its thick fur and fat insulate it. Pupils can test insulation with ice cubes wrapped in different materials, then write up what they found using the words on the mat.

Two distinctions are worth teaching on purpose. The Arctic is mostly ocean, covered in sea ice and surrounded by land, while Antarctica is a continent: land covered by a vast ice sheet. And climate is not the same as weather: weather is what is happening today; climate is the usual weather in a place over many years. Pupils who can use both words correctly in one sentence have understood something adults often mix up.

Polar exploration gives KS2 pupils a great non-fiction writing context. Researchers live and work in Antarctica today, and an expedition diary or a letter home from a research station uses remote, harsh and bitter naturally. Ask pupils to plan what an explorer would pack and justify each item with a fact about the climate.

The KS1 mat sticks to words children can see in pictures and act out: slide, waddle, huddle and shiver all work as movement games. The KS2 mat adds the vocabulary of maps and science. If your class spans both, print both mats and let pupils choose; many Year 2 pupils enjoy stretching to latitude and continent once they have used the globe.