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...

Thinking Tools & Google Docs

I'm working today on some pages for the Badger GCSE book which focus on some Thinking Tools.

These are small strategies for putting together some ideas and making sense of them. There are lots of strategies that have been featured in other books, so my challenge is to provide a geographical twist on some of these, and to try to identify the ones which I think will work best to support GCSE Geographers.
The nature of geography means that there are certain of these graphic organisers which perhaps will work better in the classroom, or for recapping outside the classroom.

I've also been working on some pages on the use of Google Forms (one of the Google Docs)
These are now getting increasingly useful.
If you, or your students are over the age of 13, you should really have a Google Account so that you can have access to these tools, even if you don't use the other elements of a GMail etc.

Many schools, my wife's school included, have switched to GMail for their main staff accounts.

Google Forms allow for many uses - a collaborative document started by Tom Barrett provides a great deal of inspiration for possible uses, some of which are developed further in the book...