In year 8 will started to look at rivers, I use Victoria Ellis’s rivers introductory video (Nice bit of Enya..) as a starter, we then produce a poem entitled the ‘River’. Reminds me that I want to record some of them and put them online- one for this week to try…

In year 9 we started weather and climate, we considered the difference between the two terms, and then began to produce maps of the average summer and winter temperatures across the British Isles. Good traditional stuff!

As a part of this I produced a piece of quantitative research ( 300 kb pdf ) about the experience of our present year 7 cohort, in order to see whether there were any specific trends related to the students that were struggling with the transition.

As part of my role, I’ve suggested teaching and learning strategies from the exercise. I feel rather than curriculum reorganisation, there are a number of potential practitioner based strategies, that could be used to ease the introduction of some our students into secondary education.

I wondered whether anyone would like to contribute their wisdom. Two points really.

• From your own experience do you recognise the conclusions I have drawn?  Are the suggestions appropriate? Could you suggest others?
• Have you adapted the Year 7 curriculum to aid transition? How successful do you think the strategies used have been?

Another great little video, I like the idea of producing a similar video for College.