THE NEW GEOGRAPHY

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The present study claims that preschoolers’ spatial behavior is affected by parental person’s spatial behavior or attitudes toward bringing up children and by the features of the geographical environment preschoolers are living in. Therefore, the author carried out an interview using the verbal description method, and came into direct contact with nursery school children (aged 3-6 years) living in Kawai, Tanushimaru in Kurume City, a rural area in Fukuoka Prefecture, to study the features of preschoolers’ geographical environment by grasping their spatial behavior.
First, the author showed subjects scenic photographs taken from the five main routes which the subjects might pass through on their way to nursery school “K” every day. To ensure that the subjects accurately perceived the main routes between nursery school “K” and their homes with the photographs, the author asked 35 parents to help draw the routes for research analysis. The research thus mainly concentrated on 35 preschoolers and collected their answers an the core resource. After the interview, the author found out that the routes the subjects picked up from the photographs were definitely the same as what their parents completed previously. Therefore, the subjects’ answers were collected and analyzed.
The result shows that preschoolers’ perception of the environment can be categorized into “Six Elements”: 1) shopping, 2) game, 3) vehicle, 4) route, 5) sight, 6) creature. Furthermore, a model was consequently developed based on the findings. To specifically provide evidence for the process of preschools in perceiving environment, the study mainly discussed one of the subjects, four-year-old boy T, whose perception of the routes is identical with what his parent drew with “Six Elements”, and also the formation of T’s perception of the environment at nursery school “K” in a Japanese rural area.

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Distributions of traffic accidents form some spatial patterns that are strongly reflected by movement patterns of people and cars, relating to geographic aspects of place of each district in city. This article proposes the usefulness of traffic accident as teaching materials of geographic education in junior high school, because students will be able to develop their geographic thinking by analyzing several relationships between the spatial pattern of traffic accidents and the geographic aspect of place, and also they will develop their geographic skills by experiencing field observation at their school district and using various maps and statistics of traffic accidents. An example of geographic research activity in junior high school locating at a suburban area in Osaka Prefecture is presented with the teaching design table of estimated time of ten class periods, constituting of lesson objects, students activities and some examples of maps and statistics.

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