s5 Environmental Interactions Writing Support

We have been looking at ways to improve the quality of writing in these questions both in terms of the geographical content e.g. terminology and appropriate use of language, and also in how the answers themselves are structured. One idea is to use a Wordmat for revision purposes and I would like to use this in conjunction with past papers both at home and in school. Basically, the idea behind this is that we collate as a class a definitive list of terms alpahabetically, and then students can use this as a quick reference point when answering questions. The purpose of using this is to a) move away from relying too heavily on textbook style answers which people are producing for homework, but are finding difficult to replicate in exams, and b) making response more 'geographical' instead of vague generalisations by using appropriate geography vocabulary. I have produced a template here for Rural Land Resources questions which refer to Upland Carboniferous limestone, with some key terms already listed. I will post this again, with a fully updated Wordmat after students have completed the exercise. We will then use this to trial with past papers and can compare the results to previous efforts-not just in terms of the overall mark, but hopefully in terms of the fluency and accuracy of the answers.