Year 13

After spending our first lesson back reminding ourselves about the structure of the A2 course, analysing the AS results, achieving slightly better marks in the Summer GeoNews Quiz than Year 12 did, we spent Friday's lesson looking at progress with projects.

Remember that you should, by now, have a plan together of what you are doing and when - regardless of whether you are replanning a new investigation, or are about to start writing up your project. We will spend Friday lessons on project work, but we need to make sure that write-ups are finished by mid-November so that we have time to get plenty of practice of exam questions in before your exam in January.

This morning's lesson was an intro to Plate Tectonics - and a reminder that you need to be keeping an eye on the news so that you have an up-to-date knowledge of what's going on in the world, and some "golden nuggets" to incorporate into those essays you'll be writing.

Homework, for when I see you on Tuesday next week (I said Thursday initially - but it's Stop the Clock Day, and Friday is project work) - is to find out about Alfred Wegener... Who was he? When was he around? What did he do/say?

Year 12 - Drainage Basin Hydrological Cycle

Once we had looked at the structure of the course, and what you need to be doing in terms of reading, notes, organisation, etc., on Wednesday, we had a look at some key hydrological cycle terms.

Thursday's lesson was then spent looking at the systems approach, the idea of open (eg the drainage basin hydrological cycle) and closed systems (eg the global hydrological cycle), a recap of the features of a drainage basin. We then had a more detailed look at the drainage basin hydrological cycle, and you began putting together your hydrological cycle flow charts.

I've spent some time this afternoon marking these, and the exam question you did, and I am pretty impressed on the whole (not least with the fact that all of them were handed in on time!). We will start tomorrow's lesson with a quick look at those.

Welcome/welcome back!

Apologies for the fact that the first post of the year comes a week into the new term... but welcome back to Year 13, and welcome to the new Year 12 group.

Make sure that you visit the blog regularly - summaries of lessons will be posted here, together with resources, websites, news stories and other interesting bits and pieces.

Your first interesting website is this one - a set of podcasts from the NERC on a variety of topics...