That Blue Square Thing

Dunwich Cliffs Resources

Beach and rocks at Cape ChignectoNote: The Beach Profile Spreadsheet has its own page.

These resources were produced for Year 9 in the main - Dunwich was in the catchment area of the school I was working in at the time and they'd usually been on a visit to the coast, including Dunwich, in Year 8. There's a whole load of stuff, some of which might hopefully be useful for someone.

You might want to look at some photos of the coast at Dunwich if you don't know it. Maps and so on can be sourced from the usual places - you could probably use Google Earth pretty effectively as well.

The Dunwich Horror Mystery

Erosion signWhich features Roger the Dog and is a good starting point for a unit on coasts.

pdf iconThe Mystery Cards tell the story. They don't go in any order so don't try that approach! In the story someone gets hurt - who gets hurt and why?

The key is the why - and there's lots of opportunity to unpack coastal erosion causation. There really is no right or wrong answer to this one - maybe Mr Grimshaw was drunk, maybe he slipped, maybe he was abducted by aliens. It probably works best if you look to pull out the deeper metacognition aspects - I used to ask students to select the cards they thought had no useful information on; you can usually argue that most things have some importance.

ppt iconThe Introduction PowerPoint simply provides a quick context for the piece of work. This was always my first Year 9 lesson - no exercise books needed!

The Dunwich Explain task

Looks at explanations, which I see as a key skill to develop for GCSE, and tries to unpack them.

ppt iconThe Explain Task PowerPoint provides the introduction and some examples of good and bad explanations. The aim is to use some cards to prioritise the possible reasons (again, no real right answer) and then to write an explanation. By using the examples you'd look for students to improve their own explanations by revisiting them.

Another way to do this would be to get them to write their own explanations one lesson and then take some of their work and use it as examples - they tend to look at it very critically when it's up on the board even if it doesn't make a lot of sense as an explanation when it's in their book!

pdf iconThe Priority Cards are a very simple technique. Some people like to use those diamond things to work with these to help children lay them out.

Dunwich Opinions

This was developed to look at some of the elements of the 2009 AQA B GCSE spec, specifically the smaller research piece of coursework. It focuses on the markscheme and uses it to structure a summary piece of work - you could probably use this as a final piece on a coasts unit with not very much adaptation.

ppt iconThe Opinions PowerPoint is all that's needed. I think I usually did a "On the one hand/on the other hand" exercise before we did this final piece, which is probably quite useful as a way of making sure children have thought about the issues.

pdf iconThe Speech Bubbles resource could be used to help set up the opinions piece, or as part of work on coastal defense options.

Odd One Out

This is just a simple Odd One Out, which is always a good meta-skill to develop.

pdf iconThe Coasts Odd One Out sheet.

This can become very open-ended if it needs to be of course. Again, not necessarily a right answer!

Étretat Headland Drag and Drop Image

This is a result of mucking around with some more drag and drop functionality (see the cool weather maps for where this started). Years ago I had a couple of pages with images and draggable labels. The idea was that the labels could be moved around by students as a way of making sure they could identify features.

Having lost the original files somewhere, I thought it might be handy to work out how to do it all over again - so here's the first trial version, the famous arch at Étretat in northern France.

> The Etretat Drag and Drop Image page