Building walls and cities

Categories: Urban, rivers, s1 and s2
Starting to find my feet with classes now at the new school. It seems that one of my s4 group are quite far ahead in the Settlement topic. I showed the class Charley goes to New Town last time we were together, and thought that this would be an excellent prompt for them to try a Planners of the Future activity from sln. As I'm just getting to know the group, it would let me get a further indication of how well they have understood the content so far, as the exercise demands a reasonable knowledge of site, situation, function, urban models and urban change. I would have liked to have tried this via sim city, but haven't checked if a) it's not filtered for students, and b) I'd have access to a suite, so we'll go for the paper version just now. I'll probably photograph some of the results, cross post here via posterous and ask for some comments from the class on each others work.
S3 presented back their river features last time, so I'd like to just firm up on some of this. Many groups started well, but forgot to mention river processes, so it's either this or this as a period starter, some teacher led explanations in the middle, and an adaptation of this at the end to review where we are at. I've also started one class on a wallwisher task which will provide a self sourced revision page. Looking forward to seeing how this develops over the week.
Finally, while still on wallwisher, I am starting the Japan topic with an S2 class tomorrow and I've produced a variation of the rainforest wall that was a successful tool with the S1 in my previous school. I also do a little basic Japanese and encourage the class to start our lessons with some Japanese greetings and set a family tree homework exercise using the Japanese name translator. Hoping this can then be displayed in the class.