Interactive Replace sits at the Interactive row and Replace column of the PICRAT grid. Below: real Geography lessons for middle school (KS3, Years 7 to 9, ages 11 to 14) that sit in Interactive Replace, plus anti-examples that look like it but sit elsewhere.
Grade 6 Google Earth biome hunt across eight coordinate points
Year 7 are mapping the world's biomes. The teacher gives eight coordinate points, and students fly to each in Google Earth, look at what the land shows (rainforest canopy, sand seas, tundra, irrigated fields against desert) and fill a table with the location, the biome and two pieces of visual evidence for their identification. Point six is deliberately ambiguous, on a savanna and forest boundary in central Africa, to bring in the idea of transition zones. The plenary asks students to defend their answer for point six from their evidence column, which turns the lesson from naming biomes to reading the evidence on the ground.
Tools: Google Earth Nine ideas for your own version in Generate
Grade 6 self-paced Wayground grid-reference set on an OS map extract of Keswick
Year 7 are halfway through their map skills unit. Last year the department set a 20-question student-paced Kahoot challenge on the licensed 1:50,000 Ordnance Survey extract of Keswick, and this year, having moved to Wayground, the teacher rebuilt the same 20 questions as a self-paced set with power-ups and redemption questions switched off. Students work through it at their own speed with the map extract printed on their desks: eight four-figure references, eight six-figure references and four symbol questions such as locating the youth hostel and the church with a tower. The teacher has also switched off the setting that shows answers during the activity, so students are not told whether each answer was right and nobody sees a score in the lesson. In the second half of the lesson students write the six-figure references for five features of their own choice in their books, and the teacher reads the question report after the lesson to plan the homework.
Tools: Wayground (formerly Quizizz) Nine ideas for your own version in Generate
Grade 7 finding today's highs and lows over the Atlantic on Windy's pressure layer
Year 8 are learning how pressure differences drive wind. Each student opens Windy with the pressure layer showing isobars and the wind particle animation switched off in settings, so the answers cannot be read from the moving streaks, and works through the department's standard chart-reading questions in their books: locate the deepest low over the North Atlantic, read its central pressure, find a high where the isobars are widely spaced, and decide where winds will be strongest from how tightly the isobars are packed. Students zoom and pan to find each feature and write the wind direction around the low using the rule they have been taught. The lesson closes with the classic question, why does wind spiral round a low rather than blow straight into it, which the teacher answers with a short explanation of the Coriolis effect.
Grade 8 filling a tropical storm data table from Windy's wind, pressure and wave layers
Year 9 are building their tropical storms case study, and the teacher runs this lesson in September while a named storm is active, which in most years means one is on the map. Pairs open Windy, find the storm and complete the data table from the scheme of work: central pressure, peak sustained wind, wave height at the nearest coast, rainfall around the eye, and the distance from the eye to the edge of gale-force winds, estimated using lines of latitude, where one degree is about 111 kilometres. Because each value sits on a different layer, pairs keep switching between them, and the table makes the links visible: pressure falls, wind rises, rain wraps round the eye. The final question asks pairs to predict which stretch of coast takes the worst of the storm and support the prediction with evidence from two layers.
This page is one of a growing set of PICRAT examples by cell, subject and grade. Page maintained by Andy Perryer.