At first it's cold, and then it's hot...

Categories:s1 and s2, Glaciation, Other
A weekend of snow has resulted in a bit of brainfreeze regarding where I'm at and what I'm supposed to be doing with my classes tomorrow. With S4, we are beginning a look at the Tundra. I started on Thursday with an inflatable globe. I've done this before and always have a smile to myself at the reaction when I say 'yes' to the inevitable question, 'Sir, are we playing with that today?'. We use the globe and wherever the thumb of the right hand lands, the student has to correctly identify whether it is Tundra, Hot Desert, Polar, Savannah, Mediterranean, rainforest or none of the above. I believe it's still important that students have a better awareness of place and this exercise always throws up a couple of crackers. I did this with the other S4 class and got some bizarre relocations of climatic regions, which we have hopefully fixed via the exercise. I also used it to then ask students to pick out some places by name in regions classes as Tundra.
We then went on to look at advantages and disadvantages of the tundra climate . I am intrigued by a comment from an online colleague, Sharon Somerville (@arcticlass ), who taught in Resolute Bay, who said 'Tundra isn't just Tundra'. I still don't know what this means, but what I do know is that students on Thursday found it really hard to think of advantages. I asked Sharon for her thoughts on this and thought this was a lovely response;I'm going to use this to start the discussion and then use some of the negatives that Sharon highlighted. If it's at all possible, it would be nice to have an open session with Sharon where the class could put their questions to her.
I have just blogged in the last post about my eureka moment for teaching glaciation. Steven Lockyer suggested using a youtube video of a snowman being built and class labelling it, which seems a nice alternative to sharing a lovely pic of my kids with my S3 class :-) Also reminded me of this clip from the infamous Hampstead Heath Snowball

Will follow this with a more standard explanation of feature formation, seeing as I can't get back in the IT lab until Wednesday to finish flipbooks/comics etc.
I'm beginning volcanoes with S2 tomorrow. Looking forward to the Montserrat lesson from Noel Jenkins , an absolute failsafe, but thought I'd start with another youtube clip, this one below;


I don't know if I can get sound from this as my IWB bulb blew, but the idea is to show it once and get a handle on vocabulary that the class haven't heard before, show it again and start a Chinese Whisper on paper. I'll ask someone to start a recap of the 3 minute summary and pass it on for the next person to extend and so on. I'll leave some prompts up on the board to help with this. While all this is going on, I'll ask some members of the class to start poulating our map at the back of the room with current tectonic hazards. All this will be against the backdrop of a written activity, so might need to scale it back depending...