This week’s post is ‘What am I teaching this week?’ rather than ‘What am I teaching next week?’ as I have been a little later writing the post – the wonder of DP report deadlines .
I am in the middle of a major update to geographyalltheway.com so some links you have may be broken. The best advice I can offer is to head for the homepage and work through the menu system until you find what you are after – alternatively contact me if get stuck.
Year 8 continue to look at tectonic hazard management focusing this week upon ‘Drills and Kits‘. I’m predicting some time spent under tables!
Year 9 will finish watching the film ‘Marie-Antoinette’ and writing a Movie Review about it, focusing upon an element of film-making and it’s historical creditability.
Year 10 will turn the images they took while ‘playing’ with play-doh into animations with an audio commentary – see the image above. They will also be having job interviews for the position of a tour guide with ‘Seaside Tours‘.
Year 12 will continue with an overview of hurricanes as a natural hazard. Homework will be a case study of a recent hurricane in a LEDC – probably using Cyclone Nargis. Hurricane Katrina will be used as a MEDC case study next week.
I am continuing to do some major maintenance on geographyalltheway.com -- so it may be worth checking any bookmarks you have to ensure they work before a lesson. Otherwise head for the home page and work you way through the menus. geographyalltheway.com is almost 4 years old now!
Year 8 this week will be focusing upon ‘Are you prepared for the big one?’ -- looking at tectonic hazard management. This will be mainly building design this week. I have purchased all the necessary materials to build a shake table so sugar cube buildings will be included at some point. I will post more about this as it progresses.
Year 10 will be continuing to look at coastal landform after last week’s ‘I-Spy at the Seaside‘. This will involve some stop animation (hence the YouTube clip at the top of this post) either in with Play-Doh or maybe something in the style of the videos produced by the Common Craft show.
Maintaining geographyalltheway.com is a bit like painting the Forth Rail Bridge – when I get to one end of the site I have to start again at the other. I’m focusing my efforts over the next week or so on a big ’site check-up’ – checking that links, videos and resources work. If you spot any issues - please get in contact. I have already done the GCSE/IGCSE section and will be starting the KS3 section after I finish writing this post.
Next week should have a good start. Monday is a ‘Journee Pedagogique’ (an INSET day) and I’m off with a number of colleagues on a ‘Mountain Safety and Awareness for Ski Day Supervisors’ course to Glacier 3000. A day skiing, on an INSET day, in Novermber – naughty!
Year 9 students are studying the French Revolution. This is my first experience as working as a ‘Humanities Teacher’ and I am enjoying it! I am collecting my thoughts and resources on a wiki page and I am using the excellent activehistory.co.uk as a basis of the programme.
Year 10 students have just started a unit on Coasts. We have looked at why coastal areas are important (I do like to live beside the seaside!) and are starting to look at Coastal Processes. This week we should cover transportation, deposition and start to look at how coastal processes combine to create various coastal landforms.
I am now five weeks into my new job and the dust is starting to settle!
It is ‘interesting’ getting to grips with a new ICT system. I have just set up iDisk (a little used element of my mobileme account) so that my students can upload their completed work there rather than filling my inbox.
I have also started a ‘Humanities News‘ Twitter feed. At the moment I’m using it when students complete a ‘Twitter Challenge’ – a 140 character summary of a piece of work or concept. Follow and have a look – some questions back to the students woudl be great to start some discussion.
The 140 square worksheet I use for ‘Twitter Challenge’ can he downloaded here.
I have started teaching at a new school where they teach a different programme of study from those I have experienced in the past.
The programme that the International School of Geneva Campus des Nations follows for Year 7 to 11 students is the IB Middle Years Programme. I will write some posts about the MYP once my understanding of it increases of the coming weeks.
As I teach the Humanities content I will be developing new resources for geographyalltheway.com. Some of these resources will be updated and reworked versions of existing geographyalltheway.com resources – others will be completely new.
The resource introduces weather related terminology, uses brainstorming, looks at some weather related news stories and uses some creative writing to link the terminology and the impact weather has upon our lives.
If anybody has any great resources ideas that they would like to see developed, please let me know. Also please help me by reporting deadlinks, missing YouTube clips etc as there are some pages of the site that I will not be reviewing as often as I would like.
It’s time for a summer break – so I will be taking four or five weeks off from working on geogaphyalltheway.com. With the aim of having a rest, spending time with the new addition to my family and to moving to Geneva.
I will still be checking email, moderating comments and tweeting – the wonders of an iPhone
I will be moving to Geneva at the start of August and am getting very excited about a new area to explore – as a Geographer, as a teacher looking for fieldwork opportunities and an outdoor person who likes to walk, bike and climb.
The video above was produced by a paragliding friend of a friend and show the Le Salève – a limestone mountain just to the south of Geneva.
There is a cable car to the summit, walks, VTT (MTB) routes and climbing to be enjoyed all within 30 minutes drive of where we will be living.
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