ACARA v9 CONTENT DESCRIPTION “locate positions in two dimensional representations of a familiar space; move positions by following directions and pathways”
Year 1 moved through real space: turn here, walk to the door. The Year 2 leap is representation — the same familiar space drawn flat on a page, and positions found on the drawing instead of on the ground. That is what the descriptor means by a two dimensional representation, and it is a genuine cognitive step: the child must hold the room and the picture of the room in mind at once. Every activity here uses places a seven-year-old already owns — the school yard, a zoo — so all the newness lives in the map.
The school map
No grid, no numbers, just neighbours. Most positions in life are told this way.
Find it on the map: between the gate and the library.
Position is told by neighbours
Before grids and coordinates, position is a social fact: the tuckshop is between the gate and the library, the bubblers are next to the oval. These relational words — between, next to, beside, above — are the first coordinate system children ever use, and they are surprisingly precise: between pins a place down from two sides at once. Let children give clues like these for real places they know; writing a good clue is harder than solving one, and it is exactly the descriptor's locating skill in reverse.
The zoo grid
A map with rows and columns. Saying a position out loud becomes exact.
Who lives in the fourth column, first row? Remember: columns count from the left, rows from the top.
Across, then down
The zoo grid adds order to the map: columns counted from the left, rows from the top, and suddenly a position can be said in four words with no pointing at all. This is deliberately informal — formal grid references arrive in later years — but the habit underneath is the permanent one: name the across position first, then the down. The same convention will carry the child through street directories, spreadsheets and coordinates, and it starts here, with an echidna in the third column.
Follow the pathway
A list of directions is a journey written down. Run it one step at a time.
Recipe: right, right, up, up. Take the steps one at a time.
A recipe made of steps
A list of directions is a journey written down before it happens — a recipe whose ingredients are steps. Running it one tap at a time teaches two quiet lessons: order matters, and each instruction does exactly one thing. Children who narrate the walk out loud — right, right, up — are rehearsing the sequencing that underlies every set of instructions they will ever follow or write. The destination stays unknown until the last step, which is precisely the fun: directions are trusted, then verified.
You give the directions
Now the journey is yours to plan. Test each recipe in your head before you choose.
Three recipes. Walk each in your head — only one lands on the goal.
Check it by walking it
Planning a route is the inverse skill, and it comes with a built-in honesty test: walk the recipe in your head, square by square, and see where it truly ends. Children quickly discover that two different recipes can land on the same goal and that a plausible one can miss by a single square — both discoveries matter. The first shows that pathways are choices; the second builds the habit of checking a plan against the map before declaring it correct, which is debugging in its earliest clothes.
The roof comes off
Same room, two views. The second one is what every map secretly is.
The view we live in: legs, sides and fronts. A map needs a different eye.
The roof comes off
The deepest idea in the unit is the quietest: a map is not a picture of what a place looks like, it is the place seen from straight above, flattened to outlines. Once a child sees the table become a rectangle and the rug a patch, every map they ever meet makes sense, and drawing a map of their own bedroom becomes the perfect home exercise. With this unit done, the Year 2 Space strand is complete — shapes classified, positions found, pathways walked — and the maps only get bigger from here.
Quick self-check
1. A map shows a familiar place...
2. The tuckshop is between the gate and the library. Walking from the gate, what comes first?
3. You walked: right, right, up. To walk straight back you go...