The Resource Factory!

My room has become a hub for inspiration...who'd have thought it? I am really glad with how I have been able to put my stamp on my lessons in my new placement. The first years have been looking at four figure grid references and OS map symbols. I used a couple of tricks that I learnt from Dunbar and Craigmount to complete my best 4 fig GR lesson to date. Every pupil got it and what's more thanks to a little game of battleships on the next day it appears that every pupil has remembered it! I also took inspiration from an excercise I had seen on my last placement and created a rebus story (partially using pictures to tell a story...in this instance OS map symbols embedded in a text).

The second year classes are also going well. My enthusiasm for Hurricanes seems to be paying off as the classes have remained focussed and attentive...most of the time. I used a set of individual facts today (one per pupil) to progress through an introduction to hurricanes. The pupils seemed to enjoy possessing the next piece of the puzzle and came up with some very good questions. Tomorrow they are going to be looking at how hurricanes affect the UK (or not) and who the Hurricane Watch are. Another idea stolen from placement, this time from Ollie, has helped me to create a third task for a Hurricane Katrina case study. Ollie asks pupils to highlight certain exam questions with colouring pencils to show the frequency of certain questions. I have adapted this and have created a fact sheet about Katrina which the pupils will highlight with three different colours looking for the nature of the hurricane, the physical impact and the human impact...hopefully they will then combine these into a coherent set of notes describing what happened. In addition to this I will give them a magazine article which they cannot write on but must use to add to their notes. I am aiming to improve their ability to summarise information. At the moment nearly all the pupils just copy whole chunks of text.

My final spark of creativity is aimed at one of my third year classes and came from watching an episode of the West Wing. I have produced two top ten lists of reasons for and against drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve. I will give half of the class the reasons for and half the reasons against. Once they have read them they will note which they believe to be best. Then they will swap and this time, stating the facts given on the sheets, say whether or not they have changed their minds.

The creation of these resources is hugely time-consuming but very rewarding... especially when 1/3 of my week's lessons are done by the end of Monday afternoon! (5 out of 15).