How much do You know about the Kalahari Desert?

I recently signed up for a free trial with Netflix and last night I came across David Attenborough's Africa series and watched the first episode and part of the second (ok I know it came out a year ago and I need to get up to date!).


Anyway, I enjoyed it immensely, the stunning photography, the narrative, the sound track - all beautifully put together. It starts with the mystery fairy circles, which I had never heard of but immediately diverted me for half an hour of Google searches and made me wish I could do a field trip there to take some soil samples and see whether I could find any environmental gradients. Or get hold of some remotely sensed images to examiner their distribution and see if there was a pattern.

The stories of the animals really draw you in, from the nightmarish invasion of the giant ground crickets, to the mischievous drongo, the amazing cartwheeling spider and the romantic encounters of black rhinos under the stars.

And if all that isn't enough, it's narrated by Sir David Attenborough, so how could you not like it! (Although I was sad to discover a few weeks ago that not only had some of my AS students never heard of him, one of them even asked me if he was a paedophile?! =O).

Of course, the best thing about it was that I couldn't help noticing all the links to geography. I found myself wishing all my students were watching it too! So, I decided at 11pm last night it would be a good idea to make a quiz to go with the first episode. It could either be used in class or set as a homework, but particularly relevant for anyone studying arid environments (deserts).

KALAHARI DESERT QUIZ

I hope it's useful to somebody, let me know if you'd like me to make quizzes for the other episodes too. By the looks of it they will be very geographical too, and I definitely plan to watch them all so I may as well make up some questions as I do! 

Kissimmee River Restoration Resources

I've already done a blog post on the Kissimmee with some revision notes but I thought it would be useful to upload some more resources that I used in the lesson. Thank you to Mrs Humanities for inspiring me to add some resources!

First of all I have to point out the spelling of 'Kissimmee' as with all those double letters it can be easy to make a mistake, and you don't want to spelling the names of your case studies incorrectly! So here is a way I came up with:

...read the rest

Play Dough Volcano Models!

You're never too old for play-dough, even at A2, so the last few lessons of term we decided to use it to learn about our two volcanic eruption case studies: the 2002 eruption of Nyiragongo and Eyjafjallajokull.

The challenge was to not only model the volcano but make a scene of what took place and annotate it with the nature, impacts and responses to/management of the event. Check out the models my students made! It was boys vs girls, can you guess who made which?

Here is Eyjafjallajokull with its huge plume of ash and fissure eruption. They decided to leave out the overlying ice cap as it was difficult to model, I think the newspaper round the sides is to represent ice.

...read the rest

Competition Deadline Extended - Win £25!

COMPETITION DEADLINE NOW EXTENDED UNTIL:

Monday 26th January 2015

 
Hi everyone, after talking to some of my students and realising how many deadlines they have to meet before the Christmas break I've decided to give you some more time to get your infographic done. I know lots of you will be having mock exams in January so I hope this will give you some motivation to revise! Good luck!

Here's a reminder of the rules:

1. You must be 18 years old or under to enter

2.  It must be in the style of an infographic, not just a generic poster, i.e. it must include:

• Detailed, real-life, place specific information and/or data
• Some type of graph or map - this must be created by you (e.g. in Excel) and not just copied from the internet 

3. You must reference all sources of information

4.  Email your entry to hafsa@geogarific.com with the subject 'infographic competition' along with:

• your name
• your date of birth/age
• the name of your school or college (if you have one)

Here's a link to the original post for some helpful tips

http://www.geogarific.com/2014/11/infographic-competition-win-15-to-spend.html

The Storm Hydrograph Revision and Exam Technique

So, I spent about 40 hours (seriously, it took me HOURS) making a video tutorial to help my AS class after they almost all failed some homework questions on the storm hydrograph. I didn't have the lesson time to go over it again so I thought by making a video they could learn about it in their own time. Here are the questions if you'd like to use them:

STORM HYDROGRAPH QUESTIONS

Lets hope their homework has improved when they resubmit it! And I'm also hoping there's some more students out there who can benefit from my video. Please subscribe to my channel - if I get enough viewers I'll make some more videos and take requests. Even thought it took me a long time I actually enjoyed doing it, and it's worth it if it helps out some fellow geographers! Hope you like it!

p.s. apologies for the few mistakes and blurry images, it's my first try so it's not perfect, and to be honest I think I will jump out the window if I have to spend any more time editing it! However, it you spot anything that is totally wrong or incoherent please let me know! 

I now have a new appreciation for all those other video tutorials on YouTube....!!