Aims:
1. To know what is meant by the national grid
2. To locate OS symbols on a map using grid references
3. To give the correct grid references for features on an OS map.
The map is divided into a grid made up of squares 1km by 1km. Every grid square on an OS map is always 1km2.
The lines running across the page, ie from east to west are called Northings
The lines running and down the page, ie from north to south are called Eastings.
Every single square in the British Isles has a unique reference number. Some grid squares show very little:
Click here to find out more about officially the dullest grid square in Britain-it even made it to the QI Show!
First Years have been learning about maps, and in particular looking at the idea of their personal geography and mental maps. Everyone has a mental map in their head-if you shut your eyes you can still see places and you can work out how to get from one A to B. You can visualise places and begin to get a picture in your mind of where they are. Often your sense of direction improves, for example everyone in the class could point to the where the Science Block is even when it is not visible from my room. How?
We also looked at the idea of scale. Now with Google map, or multimap, we tend to scroll up or down a scale bar, a plus sign at one end a negative at the other. Sliding the bar allows us to zoom in for more detail; zooming out to cover more area. This becomes more complex as you get older, as your knowledge and experience of where places are develops. Classes have been experimenting with drawing mental maps of their home areas and we shall publish some examples. After drawing the mental map, you had to write up the things you found easy and difficult about this exercise. Did you put in too much detail, eg lots of little trees, or chimneys on houses? Did you start with your house and draw the map around it, or did you decide in advance what streets you were going to include? Did you exaggerate the size of your house to make it look bigger? Did you draw the houses in correct scale, ie did the size of the houses match the width of the roads and other features you included? What information did you leave out of the map? Why? Did you use colour or symbols?
This becomes more complex as you get older, as your knowledge and experience of where places are develops. Classes have been experimenting with drawing mental maps of their home areas and we shall publish some examples. After drawing the mental map, you had to write up the things you found easy and difficult about this exercise. Did you put in too much detail, eg lots of little trees, or chimneys on houses? Did you start with your house and draw the map around it, or did you decide in advance what streets you were going to include?
Did you exaggerate the size of your house to make it look bigger?
Did you draw the houses in correct scale, ie did the size of the houses match the width of the roads and other features you included? What information did you leave out of the map? Why? Did you use colour or symbols?
Further information
Click here for more information about mental maps.
Key Words: Structure; Core; Mantle; Crust; Seismic waves
Aims- To name and describe the three zones of the Earth
To use our reasoning to ask some questions to help us understand the zones of the Earth
To think about:
What is the deepest place humans have ever reached? (How can you tell how deep you have reached?)
Could we ever drill a hole to the centre of the Earth?
Assuming you could, where on the earth’s surface would you begin?
As you dug through, what would you come across?
What evidence is there that the Earth is not just a solid lump of rock spinning through space?
Dictionary Definition
Originally uploaded by luv4sams
This is the title of a regular column in the popular monthy magazine, Readers Digest. (a digest here means a summary of the main points) Each month they introduce the reader some new words and their meanings, with a view to enriching our vocabulary-ie increase your word power.
In geography we want to increase your word power. Geography is the description of place and there fore we can use lots of adjectives to paint a full, detailed and interesting picture of different parts of the world-maybe a city, a mountain, a river or a rain Forest.
Throughout the session, we shall be introducing many new words and terms. The first time you meet a new word, you will highlight it in your jotter, and you’ll add its definition. All new words will also go in a separate page of this blog called the Word Bank. As the session proceeds, you will see more words go into the word bank. You can find this page by going to the right hand pane of the blog, look for the heading “pages” and click on “Word Bank”.
Sir, what are we doing today?
This seems the most important question a pupil should ask. If you don’t know why you are in a class, and most importantly what it is you are meant to be learning or doing, then there is not much point in being there. It always helps to know what we are going to be learning.
One general approach we can apply to every lesson in geography is to think 5 Ws. This is a list of 5 questions, all beginning with W we should be asking about any place we study.
Where is this place?
What is it like?
What makes it the same as/different from my home area?
Who lives here?
Why is this place the way it is?
We don’t always need to ask all 5 questions, and there are others we ask instead, but this is a useful starting point, and most importantly gets us thinking about the idea of place.
Next-building a geographical vocabulary: what words can we use to describe places.
The rule of thirds
Originally uploaded by dgray_xplane
Today in First Year we talked a little about field sketching. You have been asked to try a sketch of the farm landscape on page 96. There is a “worked example” on pages 95-96 of your textbook, but you might also be interested in what this guy has to say about sketching. When you prepare your field sketch of the farm think about the layout of your sketch-here, the example given suggests that you divide in into thirds, effectively giving you nine squares to work within.
For more on Visual Communication, visit the excellent website, Communication Nation.
Here’s an interesting slide presentation I found on SlideShare. Given the current concerns about world food shortages and rising prices, it seem more important than ever to consider the world’s food supply and how we can avoid people falling into famine and starvation.
index cards
Originally uploaded by kparra
I have been encouraging my pupils to practise condensing notes on to index cards, as a way of helping them to revise. I am prticularly keen to get them thinking visually, and spatially, So, I got my second years to try drawing a simple sketch map of South America on to an index card, set up in portrait layout. They had to add in some key points-major cities, the Andes, the Amazon, Equator, Tropic of Capricorn, etc-all from memory. They had several minutes first to look over their atlas first. The standard was very wide ranging-some were very accurate and detailed, others naive and barely recognisable as South America, with little sense of scale or relative position. That’s not a criticsm of the pupils, but an indication of how different children process and retain spatial data. I shall upload some images of their maps over the weekend. One thing I wanted to find out was, whether there was a significant difference in the mental maps of boys and girls-my first impression is that there was… but I need to check each pupil’s index card carefully first. To be continued…………
cloud chart
Originally uploaded by jmmcdgll
It’s been a mix of a day. We went to the Scottish Deer Centre, near Cupar this morning. Nice, broken cloud, with plenty of blue sky, but come 1pm, as we all sat in the arena to watch the birds of prey demonstration, the skies darkened, the tempertaure dropped and we had hail and rain. Didn’t spoli the talk too much as we were all fascinated by the three birds on display-European Owl, Harrier Hawk and Falcon. The falcon was particularly impressive, coming in fast over the crowd like the RAF tornado we had seen earlier in the day, no doubt heading to Leuchers. Then, from 2 o’clock it brightened up and we were able to get some decent work done in the garden.
The route back from Cupar to Clarkston is like a transect through Scottish time and place-the large, rolling arable fields and extensive stone farm buildings make this a very different farming region to East Ren, with its predominant dairy herds; gold, brown and yellow to contrast with the green. I remembered the “windows on Scotland” approach we used in O Grade Geography, uisng selected maps that each convyed a sense of place-Grangemouth, for example,. still belching and flaring across the mournful mud flats of the Forth, or Blairgowrie-the classic market garden landscape, now often tilled by East Europeans (who would have predicted that social dynamic in the Communist mid 70s?).
On way back, we saw the engineering works going on for the Upper Forth crossing-struck me that I haven’t been over by Kincardine and Clackmanan since my days setting S Grade geogrpahy papers at Keiveil House, now five years ago. (Despite the tedium, I look forward to marking papers, as Markers; Meeting is a great time to meet up with old friends)
Almost everywhere I look there are wind farms, like forests of spartan, while trees. The latest is in my own backyard, at Eaglesham. They have a commanding position, and I imagine opinion is sharply divided. I think I like them, but I can choose not ot look at them-I don;t know how it would be if I had no choice.
