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Ollie Bray

Wednesday 21 June 2006

Back to school with a bump today and straight into teaching double S3 Rivers. The new timetable means that I see one of my S3 classes for an hour and 55 minutes first thing on a Wednesday morning. Although this might be better for practical subjects, I’m not convinced it’s the best way to use the time to teach Geography.

Today I was teaching a little bit of river fieldwork enquiry skills. My starter activity was a clip from BBC Wild Weather where Donal McIntyre demonstrates the power of water by creating his own flash flood in Yorkshire. This seemed to capture everyone’s attention and helped reinforce my first point that river fieldwork can be dangerous and selecting an appropriate site is one of the most important things that you have to do.

With this in mind we headed off outside (avoiding the rain showers) to the DunbarGrammarRiver. This is a very safe river as it’s actually really just the path from the car park into the front of the school. However, with the right imagination the grass verge become banks, the tarmac becomes the water and the bend in the path become a meander.

Using a variety of fieldwork equipment we measured the path (I mean river!) for width, depth, gradient and velocity. We also talked about river beaches and river cliffs. When I was reliably informed by one of the pupils that I needed to be careful to not get my feet wet or the water of my Wellington boots, I decided that my job was done and it was time to head back inside for a consolidation exercise.

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