JDMcDsblog

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…………