Year 7 are moving from persuasive letters to writing a speech on climate change for a class assembly, and their evidence paragraphs tend to repeat vague claims such as 'the ice is melting'. The teacher opens the Timelapse layer in Google Earth on the board, flies to the Columbia Glacier in southern Alaska and plays the annual satellite images from 1984 onwards. The class watches the glacier's front pull back up its valley year by year, leaving open water and floating ice where the glacier had been. The teacher replays it, pausing at the first year, a middle year and the latest, and students note in their books exactly what changed between each stop. They then write the evidence paragraph of their speech as a first-hand description of what they watched, and the teacher reads two aloud to show how specific detail persuades where a general claim does not.
Tools: Google Earth Nine ideas for your own version in Generate
This page is one of a growing set of PICRAT examples by cell, subject and grade. Page maintained by Andy Perryer.