World Food Day - simple actions...

Chapter 3 of the Badger Book is about memorable teaching, and suggests that topics are often best taught to coincide with particular events or special days where the profile of that subject is higher, and there are more stories in the media to reinforce the relevance of the learning...
Today (October 16th) is World Food Day, so this would be a good event to tie in with teaching about food, agriculture, food aid and related topics from the GCSE specification....

For World Food Day

For example, a simple action for students to take in the lesson would be....

Watch this video and take the quiz - 3 simple questions to answer...
You can feed a child...

Do this with a group, using school e-mails and a group of children the same size will get a healthy meal.
Bear in mind that over 100 000 people in the UK have relied on Food Banks since April this year....

It's worth perhaps doing a quick 5-10 minute starter today...
Ask students to follow up three leads from the #worldfoodday feed on Twitter, and then 'feed'back to the class...

Hurricane Season starting...

The Badger book includes a range of ideas for ensuring that the course is organised in such a way that the topics are taught at an appropriate time. Chapter 3 on 'Memorable Geography' provides a range of similar advice.

With that in mind, you should get ready to start teaching about tropical revolving storms. 
This could be set as a Summer holiday task for Year 10 students if Natural Hazards / Weather Hazards are on your specification, or alternatively set as a pre-GCSE task for those Year 9 students who you know have opted to continue with GCSE (assuming a 3 year KS3)


Hurricane season will start at the end of May... or has it already started ?


Tropical Storms Alberto and Beryl have already formed, but not developed any further...
Why does the hurricane season in the Atlantic start at this time of year and not earlier (or later ?)
Challenge your students to explain why...
Alberto and Beryl were the first in 2012's season - who is next ?
How are hurricanes named ?
Will there ever be another Hurricane Katrina ?

If you'd like a great activity using GIS and enquiry, you'll also need to get yourself a copy of Bob Lang's 'GIS made Easy' book. This contains a full lesson activity and associated resources which teaches about some key GIS skills through the context of exploring hurricane paths. I edited this book.
You can have a sneak preview of the book by visiting the GA website.


Visit the NOAA site for all the latest information.


You also might want to catch up with a recent Twitter chat with the hashtag #hurrichat while it's still there: experts answering questions on hurricanes.
Another reminder of the power of Twitter (which is featured in the book too)

It's part of Hurricane Preparedness Week - lots of YouTube clips and other resources. There's a very useful PDF download of a guide on how to prepare.

Get ready for the season ahead... Students could be put be put into teams and briefed to keep an eye on a particular name and track it and report back...

John Davitt's Learning Event Generator

This features in Chapter 3 of the book, and a version of the tool is included on the CD that comes with the book.
John has been working on an online version of the tool which you can edit yourself as part of a web page, which would be useful to avoid the need to run any software, so would work well if you were using a Chrome Book, for example, or a laptop in a classroom that was not your usual one...
Click on the word to change the 'subject' and generate a random way of doing it.

Purchasers of the book have further guidance and resources to help them make use of this tool....