Our curriculum journey

Ahead of another new academic year, it's been time to refresh the topics we teach. We've changed things around a little and dropped a topic to make space for others to stretch out a little, and have some flexibility for other events which may or many not happen.

Here's our Curriculum Journey from Y6-Y8, after which the students move up to Senior School.

We have a separate diagram for Y3-5 Geography which I'm still updating.

Thanks to the person who produced the original template whose identity I have lost over the years... if you recognise it please let me know and I'll add a credit to the post.

Is the UK hot right now?

Thanks to Ed Hawkins for the link to this website via LinkedIn.

He explains all about the website here in this blog post. 

Every hour a global set of automatic weather stations openly report temperature and other weather measurements - these are called ‘synops’. For the UK, you can now see the latest temperature observations in the context of the past few decades.

What is 'normal’? For this website we use the temperature observed at the same time of day and time of year, averaged over the 1991-2020 period, as ‘normal’. We would love to use a time period that was longer ago, but the hourly observations required were not taken in enough places. Nevertheless, this tool allows anyone to see how hot (or cold) it currently is near where they live, relative to recent experience.

Is the UK hotter than normal at the moment?

Site built by Dan Harris, supported by Co-Centre for Climate + Biodiversity + Water.

GTE Conference 2025

 My session took place after the morning break on Day 2.

I spoke about the work we had done at King's Ely Prep to develop a new unit on Samantha Harvey's 'Orbital'.

This was still a work in progress, but has gone down well so far, and there is more to come in the final 2 weeks of this half term.

I will be blogging about this again once it has been completed, and sharing all the resources. Year 6 have been enjoying the unit I think - a questionnaire is coming up.

Thanks to Sophie Wilson for sharing some images of me in action. I was pleased with the reception to, and interest in, the talk and the project.

Images: Sophie Wilson

Mitigating against extreme weather

Shared by the Met Office.

Each group will be tasked with imagining they work for a local weather office and have to make a poster to help people understand what to do to prepare for a specific extreme weather event and reduce its impacts.

Available in English and Welsh (PDF downloads)

Biome Viewer

Thanks to Hannah Steel for the link to this useful visualisation tool.

Biomeviewer displays a range of information in a visual way.

It's really useful for identifying biomes in a general way, and rotating the globe to see where they are located and identifying their characteristics.

There are accompanying resources in a folder, student worksheet and apparently an iOS app too.

The worksheet takes students through the various features which are built into the app.

You can also explore anthromes: anthropogenic biomes. These are where the majority of humanity lives.

A classification proposed by E.C. Ellis, October 25, 2005 lists them. Minimum mapping scale greater than or equal to one square kilometer.

Source: https://ecotope.org/about/anthropogenic_landscapes/

There is a lot more information and some useful maps on this website too, which is the new home of the previous link. Lovely work and I now want to do something with this as well...

Overheating schools

This new Carbon Brief resource was once again the perfect timing for some work we are doing in school. It explores the impacts of warmer summers on schools and the performance of students.

Thus far, we have not had any prolonged periods of weather over 28 degrees C - the heatwave threshold for Cambridgeshire.

South America

The first Year 6 topic is South America.

Here's a useful question to ask them, as featured on The Chase.

Icons of England

Year 5 and 6 Explorers (in the weekly activities slot) are starting the summer term of exploration with a look at Great Britain (as we run up to the Queen's 90th Birthday). Today, I went through 100 icons of England as voted for in a web poll some time ago (I used it as part of my Pilot GCSE unit on the representation of places). There are also connections to be made with this year's title for the 'Young Geographer of the Year' competition, which looks at changes in Britain (full details should appear in the next week or so)

Students were asked to identify the icons they'd heard of from the list, and those they hadn't. I did a quick whistle-stop tour of all those they hadn't... and they were then asked to identify their chosen Top 10. This is the collation of the whole group's choices.

We will be researching these next week, to produce a visual collage representing Britain, and then focussing on Ely...

Made with Tagxedo.

Year 6 Taster Day

Today was Year 6 taster day. There were 4 groups of around 20 students who I had during the day - some internal students, and others who were visiting for the day for a taste of the school.
We were looking at the idea of exploration and wanted to get the students being creative. The original idea was for them to be outside, but persistent rain during the day put paid to that idea.
Here's the activity we used.
You will need the Lego Learn to Learn Education pack if you want to use that part of the activity, or a lego minifigure per person / group if not...

Year 6 Taster Activity from GeoBlogs