Real classroom lesson ideas that sit in IA, with anti-examples to sharpen your placement.
By Andy Perryer, Head of Digital Learning3 lessons
Interactive Amplify (IA) sits at the Interactive row and Amplify column of the PICRAT grid. Below: real Science lessons for KS3 that classify as IA, plus anti-examples that look IA but are not.
Ecosystem food web building, class merge
Year 7
· 50 min
· 1 device per student
Each student is given five organisms from a shared habitat (e.g. a temperate woodland). They build a partial food web on their own Jamboard frame. In the second half of the lesson, the class merges all frames into a single class web; the teacher highlights cross-web species (those that appear in multiple students' webs) and asks the class what role they likely play.
Year 8
· 60 min
· 1 device per student plus practical equipment
Students conduct a basic spring extension experiment at their bench. Each student enters their three measurements into a shared class spreadsheet. The class scrolls all thirty rows; the teacher highlights outliers and asks the contributing student to explain whether the outlier reveals a measurement error or a real effect. Pairs then plot the class average against load.
Each student is assigned three elements (e.g. by row in a register list). They post each element to one of three Padlet columns (metal, non-metal, metalloid) with a one-line property justification. The class scrolls and the teacher pulls out any element that landed in the wrong column, asking the contributing student to defend before the class corrects.