Geography

Finding our place!

With Geography fieldtrips back up and running we have reignited our passion for all things environmental!

Noting the societal change in attitudes towards our stewardship of the planet and learning about the challenges we face and how we might overcome them.

Our seniors visited Lulworth Cove and Durdle Door to practice some of their fieldwork techniques and consolidate work on coasts. Part of the fieldwork involved asking the public questions, to which many people commented how polite and charming the children were. After a day of working hard in the sunshine, the children had a chance to demolish a good amount of ice cream, rounding off a successful trip to the coast!

Back in school, topics ranged from weather and climate, map skills, settlements and rivers. To bring the river formations to life the children worked together in groups to create 3D river dioramas, showing the long profile of a river. This allowed the children to unleash their artistic and problem-solving skills when creating these models. There were some fantastic efforts and some wonderful creations.

In the Lent term, topics ranged from polar environments and explorers (both historic and modern), energy resources, plate tectonics to population and migration.

Our seniors visited Lulworth Cove and Durdle Door to practice some of their fieldwork techniques and consolidate work on coasts.

The seniors always get excited for the population topic as they know that means the appearance of jelly babies. They have a game to play with them first, which shows the factors that affect the population structure, a lot of self-control is needed before they are given the opportunity to eat them. Apologies to the teachers who had classes with them afterwards!

The juniors learned about plate tectonics and helped create a home-made volcano erupt in class! We discovered that when it works well, we can hit the ceiling! Others also got the chance to get creative trying to construct earthquake-proof buildings using jelly, marshmallows and spaghetti. There were a lot of sticky fingers and marshmallows that magically disappeared (!), but there were also some amazing structures and creations. We finish off the year focusing on more environmental issues such as fair trade, plastic pollution, climate change and sustainable housing. The seniors have been working hard to create presentations about sustainable housing on the Somerset Levels, the need for more flood-proof housing and more energy efficient and affordable homes. The juniors are exploring the impacts of trade and food miles and how we can be more sustainable as individuals, as a school and as a global community. As I write, our popular fieldtrip to Chesil Beach for fieldwork practice lies ahead and I’m sure an ice-cream or two!