Japan

As we progress with our studies of Japan in year 9 there have been a number of you who have been keen to have a go at origami. Remember we used origami as a way of gaining insight into the Japanese way of thinking and culture, we said it included design, engineering, attention to detail and an obsession with attention to detail and precision. For those of you wanting a bit more challenge why not try a couple of designs on this link.

Breathing Earth

Many thanks to Joel and his mum for reminding us about this site. Really interesting as we continue looking at population and development in year 9.

Is Development always good?

Many thanks to Tony Cassidy for this one. Perfect timing for year 9. Some real food for thought in this promotional video for a book.

Development: Coffee

As we start to consider the issue of development in year 9 we will think about how the worlds wealth is divided up. It is well worth spending the time reading these interviews with those involved with the coffee trade and thinking about their different experiences. What makes the difference and is this something that we can be involved in and affects us?

Measuring and Mapping Development

The trouble with development is working out what it is. Is it wealth and if so how do you measure it? Perhaps we could look at how much money a country has, but does that tell us if the money is spread across the population of a country? perhaps we look at other ways of measuring development like how long people live or how well educated they are? Even if we do work out a way of measuring development how do we find out and show which countries are most and least developed?
To make our lives easier others have tried to solve these problems for us. Take a look at this lovely graphic showing how wealth is spread across the world. Can you work out which are the poorest and richest parts of the world? Even more helpful is the gapminder site which allows you to create the most amazing and mindblowing graphs and maps on world development. A word of warning though it is not always easy to understand and you may need to take the tutorial. We will be using this in class though, so its worth taking time to understand it.

Year 9 Population

Now that we have returned for the New Year we begin our studies again in Population in year 9. This week we are going to compare population to a bath! If you are still puzzled by this then think of the water as people and think what the taps and plughole could represent, as you think about it more deeply, what about other things like the size of the bath or the overflow?

One of the important trends we have seen is that people are living longer. This has a big effect on the age of the population. We can see this effect on something called a population pyramid. We will be covering this over the next couple of weeks but if you want to have a look at what is predicted to happen and even have a play around with some possible outcomes try this out. Just click on start simulation, after 2050 you can use the sliders to adjust how long people live and how many babies are born. What happens for example if birth rate falls?

Population and Development

Year 9 are about to start their new topic of Population and Environment. With ever increasing pressures on our planets resources the scene is set for an exploration into one of worlds most pressing issues. In the first few lessons we will look at how many people there are in the world. You might want to check this out for yourself by looking at a World Clock. We will also think about the worlds resources with this short film giving us food for thought. The map above shows world population the larger the country the bigger the population, you can find more of these on the worldmapper website.

Options Year 9

As the time grows closer for year 9 to choose their options, you may want to take note of the following:

"Geography in the widest sense of the concept remains to me the queen of sciences. It holds the key that unlocks the coherence of the physical world as its sister, history, unlocks that of mankind's occupation of it. Without geography's mapping of planet Earth, the work of chemists, biologists and physicists is disjointed, mere technique.

It is geography that applies common sense to the statistical hysteria of the climatologists. It is geography that brings global warming into context and applies the test of feasibility to whatever political priorities are deemed necessary. It is geography that explains why each of us is located where we are, in neighbourhood, nation, continent and planet, and how fragile might be that location. Without geography's instruction, we are in every sense lost - random robots who can only read and count."

Simon Jenkins in the Guardian newspaper today (full article here)

Of course I don't want to influence your decision...

Make your own planet.

Lots of you have asked for the file to make a larger version of the Blue Marble globe from lessons. Click here to open the PDF file ready for printing.

Alternatively try a model of the Ozone layer (click here) , or the continents (click here). If you want a further challenge why not create an origami globe (a good chance to brush up on your paper folding skills if you are in year 9!)

Development

After playing the trading game in year 9 we have been reflecting on what we have learned. We used the excellent site Gapminder to look at the real progress made by Bangladesh, Kenya, India, China, USA and Japan and we found that unlike our game where the poorest nations could sometimes overcome disadvantage real life less developed nations tended to stay poor.
We also looked at trends and patterns examining positive and negative correlations between different indicators some of you noticed for example that urbanisation seemed linked to incresed wealth. This led us on to the idea of cause and effect. One interesting trend was noticed by LOE3 who spotted that the number of children women had went down as more girls went to school.

So what do you think, is there a link? Is it a cause or effect and why do you think there is a link? We will discuss this in class or you could leave a comment. For those of you who we will be seeing for the last time this week, we wish you well for the future and remember to keep checking back here to find out whats going on at your old school. We'll be sad to see you go :-(

Population and Development

The school theme this week has been "Developing Countries" and in year 9 we have just started our new topic of population and development. To introduce the topic we looked at the population counter and saw just how fast the worlds population is growing. We also agreed that a world with over 6.6 billion people living on it is really hard to get our head around. To help us we watched miniature earth which shows us what the world would be like as a community of only 100 people. Which poses the question; if we lived in a community where only 3 of the hundred owned 59% of the wealth would we do anything about it?

Japan

As we draw our studies of Japan to a close it seems a good time to reflect on what we have covered. I came across this excellent series of images compiled by a user on Slideshare. It seems to sum up the themes we have covered quite well.

Geography and reading week.

Thanks to all the groups who have been involved in doing "Horrible Geography" book reviews this week. The results have been amazing and it's been hard to choose the winners in each class.

Those who have been selected will be given the chance to process their reviews next lesson and then get them published on the geography website under pupils work.

Once again thanks for supporting Reading week with such enthusiasm.

Geography Photos update

Thanks for the early returns of geography photographs to add to our online collection with flickr. The quality is great but we need more please. Remember if you have been somewhere interesting or seen something geographical e-mail it into school with a short message explaining where, when and what it is!!

It's the World, but not as we know it!!

The map above was taken from the Worldmapper web site. On this site you can see many images of the World distorted to show information. The example above is of World Population and each country is the correct size for its populaton rather than its land area. Can you see any surprises? Perhaps you can explore the site and send us comments back on what catches your attention.

Year 9: Origami

Coming soon in year 9...

Click here for more on "Paper Origami Lessons "

Japanese food

Learning about a different country and culture can be very exciting and confusing at the same time. Try this link to see how the Japanese eat Sushi. You can also use other videos from this site to see how various Japanese foods are cooked and prepared