Geography Teaching Today

Adding a few fun activities can engage your students in geographical learning - and make your fieldwork exciting and relevant.

Field studies tutors at Slapton Ley Field Centre in Devon argue that there doesn't necessarily need to be a distinction between the teaching and learning approaches used in the classroom and the field.

For example, it can be useful practice to adopt starters and plenaries in the field to structure your activity, or to engage students in role play and drama.

The list of ideas below introduces some simple activities to get you started, and the links in the grey boxes on the right of the screen direct you to websites and resources where you can find out more.

Starters

• Play I-spy to identify landscape features
• Play ‘Just a minute' - students have to talk about the landform for one minute without hesitation, repetition or deviation. It's harder than they will think!
• Play charades or mime a coastal process.
• Play Taboo - students have to describe a process without using five key terms.
• Use three descriptive words and Haiku poems to express thoughts and feelings about different places.

Mains

• Use laminated photos in the field to compare the site today with how it looked in the past, or looks under different conditions, e.g. a river in flood.
• Students can also annotate the features and processes of the landscape onto laminated photos, to assist them with later analysis. This is a useful alternative to field sketching. Teachers should have a fully-labelled version for comparison.
• Ask students to take their own digital photos of the site and talk about them to the rest of the group: why did they choose this photo?What does it show? What geographical features and processes can it be used to explain?
• Collect pebbles that represent the geology of a shingle ridge and conduct a mini-investigation to predict and then find out where the material has come from. Students usually end up rejecting their hypothesis that the material will be locally-sourced.
• Set up scavenger hunts to collect and identify species in ecosystem and succession studies.
• Kim's Game is another alternative - and fun - approach to species identification.
• Compare species diversity, population density or similar through a living graph. Students congregate in groups to represent different quantities, e.g. the difference in species diversity on and off a footpath during a tourism impact study.
• Engage in some environmental art! Use natural materials to create some abstract sculpture, or even a collage of the landscape itself. Rubbings and natural dyes from plants can also be used.

Role play / drama

• Use drama or dance to act out the role of constructive and destructive waves in beach formation, or positive and negative ions in soil cation exchange. Students can also act out the journey of a water droplet from source to mouth.
• Try hot-seating - students use empathy to explore how different people might feel about a controversial issue.

Plenaries

• On the walk back to the school or coach, tell a student at the front of the group a fact that they have to relate to everyone else in the group as they pass. Not only can this act as a useful reminder to students of a key point from the fieldwork, but it keeps the group together and redistributes the fastest students to the back.
• Play ‘Equipment Pictionary' and pitch groups of students against each other to see who can identify the names and the uses of items of fieldwork equipment that they have used during the day.
• Encourage students to assess one other's field sketches - checking for labels, descriptions, explanations.

Back in the classroom

• Use your Interactive White Board to refresh students' memories of the field site using photos, video clips and diagrams.
• Project your site photos onto the white board and use them as a template for annotated field sketches.
• Use Memory Map or Movie Maker to create clips as a reminder of the different sites visited and as an aid to analysis. They can also be used in the classroom before the trip as a starter to set the hypotheses and to engage students in interactive risk assessment.