Limestory

Categories: Limestone, s1 and s2, Advanced Higher
Running very low on the inspirational juices just now, and feeling that I am relying too much on powerpoint and text with s3 just now. Thought I would maybe use a Question of Limestone with the class as a period starter tomorrow and find some way of making this competitive, before introducing limestone stories, which Miss Green did a couple of years ago and seemed to go down well while providing a challenge to students. I am not sure how she did it, but I think I'll suggest that plot is up to students themselves, could be a murder mystery for instance, could be in the form of a graphic novel, anything goes really. I'll be specifying that students must cover all aspects of the landscape, both surface and undergound. There must be a fully descriptive account of the surface landscape and the cavern network as the main backdrop within the story. Students must find a way to shoehorn into their stories reference to chemical weathering of the landscape and an explanation of how one part of the landscape has been formed. For those interested in the Graphic Novel style, I think I'll direct them to the resources mentioned in Ollie's post on creating comics in the classroom, but will get them to storyboard it first. This will probably carry over into completion as a homework task, and I think I have to be careful this year, as s3 and s6 have been getting quite a bit of homework with me neglecting s1 a bit here.
Speaking of s1, it really amazes me how different classes respond differently to the same activity. I did the hurricane in a bottle with both my s1. With 1 class, it worked an absolute treat, and we got an awful lot out of it. The class were really sharp and clued up on the science of what was happening. My other class today took longer to reach the same conclusions, but they responded much better to another activity I had used. We are building on this by using Tony Cassidy's pop-up hurricane tomorrow, followed by a bit of homework courtesy of the same author.
Finally, Advanced Higher were all a bit ring rusty today after Halloween discos and so on and so forth, so I've left the lovely statistics and standard deviation for tomorrow, but feel we made progress with the folio today, oddly. Right, off for a sleep...