Organising oneself...

Categories: Population, Development and Health, Rivers, Environmental hazards, s1 and s2, Geography General

...is really what I'll be doing with my first round of classes this week. I left work, but there are all sorts of loose ends to tie up. Speaking of organisation, I am loving bloglines , it is saving me quite a bit of time preparing lessons, as any new posts on blogs are notified directly to me. I am going to suggest that my Higher, and perhaps Intermediate classes start using this. You could put my own blog and the (admittedly in need of an update) student blog on your list for feeds, and also blogs like the Higher Geog Blog, Geobytes blog and some others-I am sure your own research and links that I have put in some of the posts in this blog will help build up a good resource for you.
I have to discuss the one child policy article with Higher tomorrow and had a laugh after I had told them to look for exaggeration, lack of factual evidence, use of language etc. I turned away to hear one of my sixth year muttering that he had dropped English last year. Clearly not everyone appreciates cross-curricular links :D. I also intend to give out a few terms on cards (examples- religion, gender, shanty town, lifestyle, asylum, immigrant, regime etc) and use them as triggers for discussion of migration-What are the reasons for the move? Is it forced or voluntary? Is it long term, short term, intra or international and so on? I will also try to pin examples on the discussions for use in exam style answers. I am not in my own room tomorrow, but if we have ICT, I'll try to use the spatial literacy website which profiles geographical locations of certain surnames in Britain and offers a comparison over time.
s4 have been doing some work on development, and we are about to look at the impact of health on development, so its cross-curricular again with Biology. I have asked to set up some stations where pupils can measure their own blood pressure, pulse etc. I can test BMI, but I think I'll draft in a couple of teachers for that one! I'll then set that against averages. Now I imagine that most will be well within the range, but I then want to get them thinking about factors which could affect their own figures ( Supersize me anyone?). We'll then set that against a world map and try and speculate about relative values in different regions-some of the answers will hopefully bring out some interesting discussion points-Seemingly unhealthy populations in supposedly developed countries and vice versa, which will hopefully bring out distinctions between health problems in EMDC's and ELDC's, reasons for them and the impact on development. Or maybe I'm being wildly overambitious....we'll see.
s3 will probably use some river images to test your knowledge of processes and landforms, as well as a little thinking skills odd one out on Rivers. s2 will have an interactive mapping activity based on last week's work(Plate Tectonics, Locating earthquakes, volcanoes and fold mountains-just a whiteboard, a world map and the pen). I then want to show a Movie maker effort by one of Tony Cassidy' GCSE pupils on fold mountains here. The reason for this is that I want students to create some movies of their own which we can then show to the class, and, with students permission, host on the wiki later.