Thunder, Lightning, Strike!

Categories: s1 and s2, Rural, Advanced Higher

This amazing picture is a nice way to end Brazil with s1, reported in our very own Metro newspaper, and perhaps a way of including something about weather, a unit we should have completed by now. We have ran out of time a bit, as we have spent a while on the Brazil topic. I was reading a report today which said that in some schools, kids were really fed up learning about Brazil and Japan. From my own point of view, I really like teaching both, and certainly parts of the Brazil topic have aroused a lot of interest with s1 - The Simpsons stereotypes, 'I'm a Celebrity, Get me out of here' and the favelas activity. However, I'm also aware that what I might see as interesting/successful might be completely different to what students experiences are. It's probably time to ask.... For the last three periods, I think we'll do a little project work, maybe on Hurricane Katrina, which we'd have studied if we'd managed to do our weather unit, links courtesy of Alan Parkinson's Geography Pages.

With one class venturing out of the rainforest, I have another venturing in, as Higher are looking at the first of three agriculture case studies, a subsistence level agriculture called shifting cultivation. We looked at the farming system today, and I remember last year we used a systems diagram very similar (in fact, it might have been the same) to this one, again pilfered from Geog Pages. It might be useful to try to complete this as a matter of course for each case study.

I fancy doing something a little different as prelim prep with Advanced Higher. One of the past paper questions is about a wind farm development, and several of the mapping questions ask candidates to choose a suitable site for a particular development. I thought I could combine these tasks a bit with the Juicy Geography Wind Farm Enquiry. Students would have to draw on the same type of resources where they using the atlas and map to complete their questions, and it would be a bit of a change in stimulus, I suppose - it depends on the level of detail that is put into the end findings.