Ours is smaller...

Categories: s1 and s2, Environmental Hazards, Urban, Population, Atmosphere, Rural Land Resources
Big day today at work, with a colleague ill, a moderation to work through and then a meeting after the school day to attend. Lots of positives though, one being a chance to get back into a higher class, which I really enjoyed. We were doing some revision in the double period, looking at two topics, atmosphere and rural land resources. I was able to strip some answers out of my old higher wiki to use. We looked at the atmosphere responses and attempted to mark them. It was interesting to note that for atmospheric circulation, the diagram was something students found difficult - most students seem to find this whole topic difficult in my experience. A great example of misreading questions too with the response to question 3 here, which many students gave full marks. With the rural land resources questions, we first of all tried to find areas of the answers where we could insert more named examples. This was testing as again, not uncommonly, students really struggled to recall these - until prompted and then the memory was jogged a little. Sad as it is to say, much of the Higher course lends itself to memorising content and this was a good exercise to illustrate how this can impact on your marks. Finally, we finished with another question which I often find is only half completed, the National Parks question. we worked through the answer as a class after the students had a go. Overall, for me anyway, a quick double period with a lot of good work done.
We started on the urban part of the s3 course with one class today. I showed some Paris model cities constructed by last years group and this is something we will use to bring the topic together at the end of the Paris study. We then drew three rings in the jotter, one for city centre, one for inner city and one for suburbs. Students had ten minutes to fill in what they would expect to find or feel like in these areas. They could work in pairs. To bring the example back to Paris, I then showed a short moviemaker clip and asked the class to put each image into one of their three zones. This was low tech but effective, as it allowed us to very quickly see that a) most of the class felt that cities had recognisable features by zone, and c) that Paris fitted some of this, but certainly not all. Tomorrow, we'll use Google Earth to talk about the site and situation of Paris, as well as maybe critiqueing some existing models of urban spaces.
The other s3 class were starting the migration topic in earnest, and we used Noel Jenkins migration powerpoint to simulate migrations within the class, something which made explaining push and pull factors quite simple to this class. Obstacles were not so easy...
s1 were in first period, and it was nice to wake the class up with some jenga to show ecosystems, which I've now done several times. Tomorrow, we are going to move on to look at whether Brazil is rich or poor, which links in quite nicely to the homework, where I have asked the class to find only positive reasons for developing the rainforest (much of the video and text we have for this is focused around the negatives, which doesn't really give much balance to the viewpoints).
Finally, using s2 as guinea pigs tomorrow. While doing earth forces, this class never had the opportunity to try earthquake proofing structures. By coincidence, today I received a cracking shaking table, a little smaller than the one above, from the tech department, complete with adjustable motor to vary quake strength. I have since been out at ASDA buying the marshmallows and straws to make the buildings and getting the same strange looks as when I bought six bags of jelly babies recently for a game :) Busy, busy day, now to learn how to make a website in dreamweaver ( I have to start this with s1 ICT tomorrow). Hoping Tuesday is quieter...