We look forward to the House Competitions in each of the Departments over the course of the year. The Geography Department give us an insight into their House Competitions this year.
Miss Moore says, ‘The Year 7 competition is a ‘Maps from Memory’ challenge in which they are given a range of maps (rivers/mountains/cities etc) to memorise, and then fill in as many as they can. They self-assess using different colour pens throughout. Each teaching group was split into their House Teams and competed against each other. Team work and communication were important for this challenge.’
The Year 7s were proud of their performances so the Department took to twitter to share the results. Here’s the winning tweet for the 7G Geography House Challenge: ‘We enjoyed working as a team, and even though we lost, we had great fun. We put hard work and effort into it’. Here’s 7O’s winning tweet: ‘It was so fun having a great time with everyone joining in and the teams were all equal, but at the end Rowling came out with a win.’
Two members of the winning team from 7G gave their thoughts on the challenge. Jasmine commented, ‘I think we worked really well as a team. We had several maps with rivers and countries named on the board and had a short time to memorise them before putting the information on our sheets. At one point we were quite far ahead. We got bonus points for the best team work shown too! I really enjoyed the challenge and learnt a lot doing the work in this way’. Harry mentioned, ‘memorising the capital cities was good. We were helping each other out on our team and listening to each other. The challenge was fun and it was a good competition in our class. It felt great to win!’
Here are the overall results for the Year 7 challenge by teaching group:
Year 8 is going to be a ‘Save the rainforest’ campaign in which they will work in house teams to produce multi-media presentations. Finally Year 9 is an ‘Earthquake proof-building challenge’, where students will design and construct earthquake proof structures using the information they have learnt about good techniques to use. The longest-standing on the ‘shake table’ (earthquake simulator) wins!
These competitions sound like great fun, not only a way to put their Geography knowledge into practice but also to work as part of a team and contribute to the House Competition. Thanks to all in the Geography Department for putting these activities together!
