GCSE Living World booklet

This 19-lesson unit is from the GCSE AQA topic of The Living World. It explores all aspects of the syllabus for this topic. Students found this unit to be very useful in developing their conceptual knowledge of quite a difficult aspect of geography as well as learning the case studies of the Amazon rainforest and Thar Desert. The resource allows a great deal of flexibility in how aspects are taught and a structured way of representing the information. This resource is suitable for all ability ranges and will support SEN learners as well as enable More Able students to complete independent work to a high standard. The booklet is a great resource for use in cover lessons.

Our school uses ‘Challenge’, ‘Big Challenge’, and ‘Super Challenge’ to identify different levels of challenge and these are represented as : C, BC and SC in the booklet. Downloading the ‘Geography lessons and tasks overview’ spreadsheet will enable you to change the overview images should you require to do so (or simply delete them).

As a department, we moved to directly completing work in booklets which I created as Head of Department instead of exercise books. This approach was a result of student voice and a change in departmental direction. We have found the booklet approach to be highly beneficial for a wide range of reasons, for example; student outcomes, ease of marking, engagement in tasks from the beginning of the lesson, easily setting starting points, AfL etc. The booklets have been very well-received by students and acknowledged as excellent practice by SLT and during an Ofsted inspection in 2018.

The creation of each booklet took me a lot of time, as did the overview spreadsheet and both can be easily changed to meet the needs of your school / department. All other booklets I have created have a similar structure and wide range of tasks and very reasonably priced. Please see the free resource - ‘Earth Story booklet’ for an example of the structure and types of tasks seen in all of the booklets. The GCSE ones and some tasks in the KS3 booklets go well with the Pocket Posters Revision Guides and we bought every GCSE student one of these as well as class sets to enable them to develop independent learning habits. They are very cheap and found at: https://www.daydreameducation.co.uk/products/revision-guides-pocket-posters?subject=42

I hope you and your students enjoy the resource.