Today's Quickie Bag...

Categories: Rural, Environmental Hazards, Advanced Higher

The weekend has just flown by. Took a pile of marking home with me and it's sitting on the table staring at me at the moment. Have had a few sleep deprived moments related to children's teething, and am feeling a little bleary at the moments, so apologies for any subsequent spelling mistakes/illogical ramblings.

I have recently joined The Geographical Association, and have been browsing their website. There was a really good starter activity based around 'Ready Steady Cook', where groups of students are given a bag of materials and five minutes to come up with a presentation on a topic. This really appealed to me for the start of Environmental Hazards with s4. I find the teaching of the Earth's structure and Plate Tectonics to this year group particularly difficult, as I always feel as if I'm repeating quite a bit of what you already know, so why not test that knowledge before we start? I'm also trying to decide on relevant bits of Ian Stewart's 'Journey's...' programmes to intersperse with the course.

I'm going to try to use some images tomorrow with Higher to talk about field layout and characteristics of shifting cultivation. I think some of this will just be built from discussion, and we'll label it as we go along, while other pictures will have key terms to drag and drop on the image in the appropriate place. If I get the chance, I'll save these and put them here for prelim and exam revision. Might use 'Gimme five' from Geographical Association again as a plenary here - five things you now want answering about the topic.

Hopefully, Advanced Higher feel like me that we made a good bit of progress with the mapping questions from past papers over the last two to three periods. I was pleased with how Friday's double went on map interpretation, and believe that we benefited from using a local map instead of the actual question paper map. You were able to visualise things a little better, and if you can carry these skills in to the prelim, you'll be fine. Lots of work ahead on individual projects, but this week, I'll continue to prep you for the exam and we'll do some urban fieldwork results testing which will complete all of your GMT work.