Lesson video

Hello, I'm Mr. Hutchinson and welcome to geography, we've been learning all about population.

And my gosh, what a lot we've learned, you have worked so hard over all of the whole unit and over all of our lessons and gained an immense amount of knowledge.

But this really interesting topic within geography of the people that live in our world, where they live, and the different population trends.

In today and our next lesson, we're not going to be learning anything new, we're just going to take the chance to take stock, to revisit, to start, to connect some of the ideas, and we're going to put all of that together, we're going to apply it into an essay.

I'll talk a little bit a bit more about what that means in a moment.

But if you've got your notes nearby from your previous lessons, now's a really good chance to go and grab them and just revisit every seems really important.

When we're first learning something, it's new.

But as we start to build that topic up, we start to build the sort of network all the different facts up, then we're able to connect ideas perhaps that we couldn't to begin with.

And now is going to be your chance to really take the time and do that.

And in this lesson and our next one.

So our essay question is going to be this, this is the big question that we're trying to answer.

And to do that, we're going to need to use all of our knowledge from all of the lessons that we've been looking at.

The question is, lack of food is the biggest population challenge of our time.

To what extent do you agree? Now we've looked at different kinds of population challenges.

We've also looked at some of the benefits of population changes and population differences.

And so in today's lesson, we're going to be here.

Well, you're going to be able to take a stand, you're going to be able to argue what you believe, based on the knowledge that you have.

Our lesson will look something like this.

First of all, we're going to plan out the first section of our essay.

And we're going to write it, I'm going to help you with planning it and then to hand over to you.

And you're going to have a go getting all of your ideas down, I put section there, because it might be a few sentences, it might be a paragraph, it might be a page or two, it's really up to you in terms of how far you want to take this, and how convincing you want your argument to be.

And how much of a beautiful piece of geographical writing you want to put together.

We'll then plan and write sections two, three, and four.

So by the end of this lesson, you should have the first part of your essay ready to go.

And in the next lesson, we'll complete that essay by completing the final parts.

So first of all, let's just think about what an essay actually is.

Now, you might have written an essay before if you've written an essay before then great, well, then you're going to be really well prepared.

It's always worth going back over though.

So an essay really is just an extended piece of writing that focuses on one subject.

So it could be a big long piece of writing about sharks or about the climate emergency that we're in at the moment, it could be about the ancient Egyptians, or reggae music, it could be about the Cold War, it can really be about anything.

What's important is that the ideas is that it's factual, that it's based in the knowledge that you have, that the ideas are presented really clearly, and very often really good essays, they sort of an argument, they they're trying to make a point, they're trying to convince the reader that you the author, is right about something about the topic and you're making a particular point about the topic.

So that's what we're going to be going for.

So in order to do that, the first thing that you're going to need to do is you're going to need to draw a table and your table should look something like this, okay? Now, this is going to be your planning sheet and it's going to be really, really important.

It's going to make writing your essay so much easier if you first take the moment to plan.

Now, I used to always be rubbish at this, I used to always think, Oh, no, skip the plan, I can't be bothered, I just want to start writing straightaway.

And it's really difficult for your essay to be good quality if you do that.

And my essays always used to be a bit of a muddle, because I haven't planned what's going to go where.

So take a moment now to get a piece of paper or notebook and take out a ruler, a pencil, or a pen and get this planning sheet sorted out, so you're ready to fill it with all of the ideas you're going to be writing about.

Some of the key points here that you can see is there should be three columns.

So one column is just going to say what the section or paragraph number is.

The largest column will be the key information.

That's where you get to jot notes about what's going in the section.

And there's also a column for key vocabulary because really good essays use specific vocabulary.

Subject specific vocabulary.

You'll probably need about eight to 10 lines in each row.

And that will help you to contain all of your ideas.

So pause the video now and make that planning sheet using a ruler on a new sheet of paper so that you're ready to start planning your essay.

Great, should be planning sheet in front of you, and now you are ready to go.

So let's look our first section, a quick reminder of the question.

And it's really easy to forget the question when you're writing an essay.

You're just trying to put down all the different things that you know, but a good essay is organised towards answering the question.

So the question is, a lack of food is the biggest population challenge of our time.

To what extent do you agree? Now you could completely agree with that.

You could say yes, that is the biggest problem.

You could completely disagree with that and say, no, that's completely wrong.

That's not the biggest population challenge.

Or you could say, be in the middle, you could partially agree.

You could say, well, it is a problem but there are other problems too.

Whatever you think and I'm sure you've got a really smart opinion here you need to marshal the evidence.

Marshal means to organise, marshal the evidence and the facts so that you can make your case in a convincing way.

One of the things that we need to do that is we need to talk about population, we need to talk about where all the people are.

Now, we looked at this and our first lesson, we studied this in our first lesson.

So if you have your notes available to you, your first lesson is what you need to be looking back at this first section of the essay.

So where are all the people you remember that we talked about the rising population of the world, the rising population of Earth and how over the last few hundred years, especially the population of Earth has really increased hugely from just a billion, a few years, a few hundred years ago, to now almost 8 billion and it's projected, it's predicted to continue rising to continue going up.

You might also want to discuss where the people are around the world.

So how often people are not located evenly, they're not distributed evenly across the world.

Some countries have many, many more people than other countries in them.

So you might want to discuss that when you're talking about population.

And that map that we studied when we were looking at population density, hopes to highlight where people are around the world, which is going to be really useful as you start to make your case for answering this question.

You might have some other ideas so if you'd like to pause the video now and jot down everything in that key information box and your planning sheet about what you're going to include in this first section, first paragraph or few paragraphs outlining where people are in the world.

So pause the video, fill in the different sections, including the key vocabulary you're going to use.

And then we'll come back and I'll show you what I wrote for key vocabulary.

Awesome, hope you've got lots of different ideas written down there ready to write.

And I'm sure that as you're starting to drop down anything grey, I know exactly what I'm going to write I've got so much to write about.

You need to make sure that you include that subject specific vocabulary.

So here's what I would include in this section, the sorts of words I would expect to see in your sentences and paragraphs.

I'd expect to see you talking about global population, the population, the whole globe, how that's growing.

So using the word of growing population, Some key facts and statistics and figures that makes a convincing argument.

You need specific statistics in an essay.

So there's 8 billion people living on planet Earth, just under what we can round up to 8 billion , by 2050 it's predicted there's going to be 10 billion, by 2100 probably about 11 billion.

You can talk about population distribution, distribution in terms of where people are around the world.

You can also talk about population density, how many people are living closely together? Are they densely packed? Are they living closely together? Or a sparsely populated and how does that differ around the world.

You might want to talk about some of the individual countries that we looked at which have very high populations, including China and India.

So if you haven't already, then you might want to pause the video and add those bits of key vocabulary into your plan.

So you're ready to use them even if you forgot them, and you might have some extra ones in there that I didn't put in, in which case, you're awesome.

I knew that you're a genius.

So put in as much as you'd like.

Pause the video now and make sure you've got your vocab list ready to help you write your sentences.

Okay, we're ready to write, we're ready to write that first section, we're going to go straight into writing that first section, we're going to better planning write section, better planning write section.

So now that you've got your plan, you can get a new piece of paper.

And some of you I know that some of you like to type these essays, like to write on a computer absolutely fine.

It's your essay, you decide how you're going to do it.

But you need either a new piece of paper with the title neatly written on it, or your computer open with a new sheet on your word processor to start writing the essay.

Now you know you've planned it, you're going to write that first section of your essay and all of this information the current and predicted information about global population that's going to help you to answer the question more fully.

So it might not be directly answering the question, but you need that those facts there so you can answer the question.

So get them all down, write in beautiful sentences, write in a convincing way.

I'm sure you're going to do an absolutely fantastic job.

Pause the video, take your time.

And once you're finished, you can restart ready to plan section two.

Great work, well done.

You've written a whole first section.

Take a moment and read it back.

Pause the video, take a moment and read it back.

Are you happy with it? Are there any mistakes? Have you got all of your key vocabulary included? It's important to check as you go along, essays take drafting and redrafting and redrafting as you're going through.

So pause the video, read through.

You know, you can be honest with yourself, you know am I happy with this, I got everything I need in there.

Pause the video, read it through redraft if you need to.

Simple work, well done, incredibly impressed, especially impressed for going back over and improving, that's the mark of a real professional.

So well done.

Next, our next section, so we're still answering this question.

What's the question, say out loud, make sure you know it.

We'll do it together.

A lack of food is the biggest population challenge of our time.

To what extent do you agree? Do you completely agree? Do you disagree? That's fine, if you do you just need to make your argument.

Our second section is going to help with that.

We're going to talk about why population changes.

So you might remember that we discussed things like the Industrial Revolution, our city starts develop as factories were built in the 17th century and the 18th century.

Let's talk about disease, so population can change it can increase in due to some factors and it can decrease due to other factors.

There have been some major diseases throughout history, Spanish Flu people don't play.

Malaria is still an endemic disease one that's going on and perhaps killed more people than anything else in the world.

So disease could change populations.

So this is a statue here of Millicent Fawcett, who we looked at during one lesson, and Millicent Fawcett really started to help change social attitudes especially towards women and fight for equal rights for women.

As social attitudes change that can have an effect on population as well.

People might have fewer babies and they might have babies later.

And lastly, health care, as we've got better at health care, as we've got better at helping sick people to get better, better curing diseases, better looking after people and helping people to look after themselves and lead healthier lifestyles, people live longer.

People don't die of preventable diseases that has an impact on population as well.

So all of these things have an impact on population.

Pause the video now and fill in perhaps these ideas I have here as well as any others that I've missed that you can remember, or you know about from perhaps an independent study.

And you can also fill in your key vocabulary box with all of the different technical words you're going to be using as you write this section of your essay.

So pause the video and do that now.

Great work ,so I just tell you the vocab that I use, you can copy it down if you'd like to.

I would here talk about birth rates, birth rates are important in turning in terms of talking about population.

I talked about how population have a natural increase.

There's more people being born than dying.

But you can also have a natural decrease.

And that can be on a global level or local level.

We, of course need to talk about the population and how that's changing, how life expectancy might have changed and how that can affect why population changes.

What about health care, we might want to talk about sanitation.

So sanitation is ensuring that dirty water gets away from where people live.

So yes, sewage, that's things like your the waste down your toilets, all of that stuff that stays near to where you live it more disease can happen.

And so having good sanitation is really important and preserving life and helping making sure people are really healthy.

As well as maintaining basic hygiene and having clean water is really important to be able to stay hygienic and stately.

So again, we're ready to go.

We've got all of our key ideas in our plan, so you can pause the video and write the next section of your essay.

As you do, just don't forget the web, don't forget that essay question that we're answering.

Are food shortages and the lack of food a biggest problem in terms of population.

And some of these ideas are going to be relevant.

So these things you're talking about are going to be relevant to that question.

So don't forget to refer to question, answer the question throughout this essay.

Pause the video and write your next section.

You can do a great job, you've got the focus, you've got the concentration, you're going to write out this just this one section, and you're going to do a great job.

Great work, we're halfway there, working really hard.

Almost there, keep it I'm really impressed with you.

Our next section.

So in the next lesson that we looked at, we looked at population pyramids.

Before I get started, why don't you have a go at filling out your whole planning sheet? Why don't you have a go and see what you can remember about population pyramids when we studied population pyramids, and how they might be helpful understanding population.

So pause the video and try and fill out your full planning sheet now.

Okay, great work, I'm going to go through what I put in my planning sheet.

And if you missed anything, then feel free just to quickly pause the video and add it in.

And you might also have some stuff that I missed, in this case, great work, you're going to have an awesome essay.

So here I wanted to sketch out the shape of population pyramids and how they help us understand the age distribution of certain populations.

So this room is one of Japan and it shows a real ageing population, I can see it.

There aren't many younger people, but the older people is that's quite a large group.

And that was different, of course to another country that we looked at, which is the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which has a different kind of population in terms of age distribution, a very youthful population, lots of young people.

So when I'm writing about population pyramids, in my essay and talking about why they're so helpful, understanding population challenges and understanding what sort of populations we have around the world.

I'm going to talk about how they use graphs.

And graphs are really helpful.

I'm going to talk about how they can help us to see data in a way that's meaningful.

That this data shows us the age distribution, and that we can see clearly the male and the female populations.

I might talk about how population pyramids allow us to make comparisons that are useful, especially if you put one side by side.

And they can talk to us about ageing populations or youthful populations.

And if you're feeling especially studious, if you're feeling like you want to be the absolute top scholar in the whole country, you could even sketch a population pyramid into your essay, it's fine to add diagrams and graphs into an essay.

In fact, it's great.

It makes them even more convincing, and even better.

So if you want to do that you can.

Pause the video.

And now that you've got your plan, you can write the next section of your essay.

We're on the homestretch.

You're doing great.

You're doing great, you've worked really, really hard.

Don't worry, one last bit left, don't give up, push on through, you can do it, you can have a great, you're going to have a great essay individually and we're really proud of you, it will be worth it, I promise you, there's going to help you to actually really understand this topic a lot better.

Because in going through that process of writing, you're going to be thinking about in all sorts of weird, wonderful and interesting ways that make you a real authority.

You can be much smarter than most people you meet in terms of population and geography.

So our final section, our final section was all about the challenges of a growing population.

And to do this, we looked at slum settlements and how they can grow very the population in slum settlements can grow very, very quickly.

We talked about some of the challenges that are presented by slum settlements and growing populations more generally, especially in terms of climate change in terms of air pollution and in terms of food, also resources that are needed with a growing population, including the food and fuel and things like that.

So we talked about some slum settlements.

We talked about how it's more difficult to have the infrastructure.

So infrastructure, all the things that you need to run a successful country are successful societies, having enough schools having a hospital places, being able to have the sorts of police and healthcare services to look after the population, that obviously becomes more difficult as the population grows.

So will we have enough services? Is there going to be enough work for everybody? Will there be enough resources for everybody including food, what impacts on the climate? Well, lots of people have.

So I've got some different ideas that you might like to add some of your own in terms of a growing population.

And how that can present challenges.

Our question is about a lack of food.

That's really just one part of the puzzle.

Now, you might say it's the biggest part of the puzzle, it's the biggest danger.

It's the biggest risk, it's the biggest challenge.

Or you might say that one of these other ones are needs to talk about them first before you argue they are a bigger challenge.

So make sure that your plans in order pause the video now and get all of these ideas down, including any of your own.

And then we'll come back and it'll be time to write the last section for today.

Super works ever, really good final plan, take a look back at all of the amazing work you've done so far, feel really proud of yourself.

You're doing a really good job.

So keep it up, okay.

So it's our final section to write.

So, put all of this together now.

All of this section together all of this plan together into a final section it could be a paragraph or a couple of paragraphs, you might want to write a bit more about this part.

So pause the video now and write the final the final section of your essay and then we'll be done.

Pause the video and write the final section on what challenges are growing population presents.

Super work, I know that I'm not asking you to do something easy.

I also know you can do it and you risen to the occasion.

Today you got to the end of the lesson and you've written absolutely loads of wonderful information all about population making your own argument.

Give yourself a pat on the back you should feel really proud of yourself.

Your hands probably aching if you're typing probably both your hands are aching.

So give them a give them a little stretch out.

Amazing work and our next lesson we're going to be completing that essay.

So make sure you come back for that so you can have a full complete essay and graduate as a complete master of this subject, and whenever population comes up and you are like, I can talk about this really authoritatively, and I probably know more than everybody else is talking about.

If you'd like to share that first part of your essay on social media so that I can see it and other people can see it and celebrate your amazing work, then you can ask a parent or carer to share on Instagram or Facebook or Twitter, you just need to tag in @OakNational and then the #LearnWithOak to be able to do that.

The sort of quiz at the end of this lesson today.

don't forget to click next and complete that quiz.

And I will see you in our next lesson.

Great work today, bye.