s1 Mashup

Categories: s1 and s2
I have left myself a little bit short of time with s1 this rotation, so I think we will improvise over two topics in the coming weeks and also try to take any fair weather opportunities to do a bit of what David Rogers might call 'doorstep geography'. Weather and map skills could be taught side by side, especially if we are keeping it local- a microclimate enquiry in the local area, for instance, could introduce lots of mapping skills. I thought about diving straight into this, but the rain clouds made my mind up, and instead, we had an introductory lesson which prompted the use of weather vocabulary, atlas referencing skills, latitude and longitude and factors influencing weather. The slides I used are below:

Weather and Atlas Skills

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I gave out a lucky bag of random locations to choose from. The idea was that some people would have pre-conceived ideas about the weather in some places- "Moscow must be cold, because Russia is always cold" was a typical comment here. The atlas was used not just to locate the place, but also to study the influence that things such as relief, distance from the sea, latitude etc might have. Students also used the map of climatic regions and biomes. From this, they formed a clearer idea of what the weather would perhaps be like and why. To finish off, we used Google Earth to create a placemark, switched on the weather layer and wrote a short comment inside the placemark about what we expected and what the weather was actually like. The next step here would be to explain any anomalies, and this could perhaps give opportunity to deepen understanding by discussion of the role of the oceans, regional microclimates etc.