Encouraging our students to make decisions and justify their choices. An activity revolving around a being marooned on a Desert Island. Ranking then Justifying Opportunity to add in cross curricular avenues with DT or PE with survival skills. Clear English overlap too. Presentation can be developed into a message in a bottle Or BLOG or VLOG -often find the students make suggestions which gives them ownership of the activity and then all the more enjoyable/engaging.

This is the culmination of students learning about Weather;Climate and Biomes. It provides an opportunity to make a suitcase and justify all the items needed for a successful trip to a chosen biome. Students can do videos, use apps or simply make a suitcase model and inside have items to talk about. Have always enjoyed seeing the results from this because there is scope for students to adapt. There is scope too for our teachers to adapt. It is often the case our students have travelled (or yearn to travel!) so this is an applied activity that can draw on their lesson knowledge and bring in their own experiences or hear about them in class discussion too. Provides great talking points, classroom display and interactive ways to present via use of technology.

Fun Communication Game! In pairs one student is blind folded, one has a print out of an object/item to describe. Strategies an be extracted from this - point on the page, clear nature of instructions given… results are amusing and enlightening. I have conducted this form time mini team build activity with many year groups.

As a final assessment for Map Skills, students enjoy creating their own Town using Scale: Distance: Symbols: Human/Physical Features learned in prior lessons. ‘Must have’ features enable the teacher to assess as sets a benchmark allowing some to add more complexity with contours and extended use of Scale. This is accompanied by a justification exercise to explain the rationale behind the town plan. Some guided sentence starters are given here but from experience students take off as they justify their hotel location near main roads, skate-park locations near housing and more… always found to be a creative, engaging applied assessment with scope for all. On reflective tasks this is one they enjoy doing. Also enables great display material too. Scrolls of justification alongside the Towns. D.E.A.L.S compliments this to guide students to explain and link and add something special. The Mark scheme is loose so open to your additions and adaptation. Good luck!

DEALS is an acronym for Describe: Explain: Analyse: Link: Something Special. It guides students when completing an extended piece of work. It also gives students element of control in what they are submitting. Students can gauge if they are submitting a piece that is purely Descriptive or if it offers Explanation then some Analysis or comment and (if required) offer examples and Links which may bring in their own experiences and wider influences/multi media/interviews/news articles as Something special. Students have command of the task knowing they are aiming to submit a piece crammed with more skills. This can be used across the curriculum subjects. I have used it in Geography/Humanities mainly but also in private tuition of KS3 English. Parents like it too as it gives structure and they see how a task is graded with these command words at the forefront.

A probing and thought-provoking resource to deliver in PSHE or Moral Education slots. By dissecting parts of a tree and assigning different themes to leaves, buds, bees,roots it makes a student or individual think about themselves, their community, their family. From my experience doing this activity some students have made posters or written poems or made models of trees with labels on to illustrate the parts and what they represent to them. So enables scope for different interpretation/presentation.

This was a local issue at the time in Kent. It allows for progress through local to national to international scale investigation of ‘conflict’. Students are encouraged to consider a range of factors and ‘players’ in the decision making process at many levels from individuals at household level to councils to national government. I bought a small toy aeroplane as part of the display in my classroom to celebrate their newspaper reports following this activity.