Those of you teaching a topic on flight, in the sky or ‘up and away’ might be interested to know that Key question 5 on how the Wright brothers innovation changed the history of flight, is now in draft format and can be sent to you as an email attachment whilst we go through the final edit. There are four principal strategies. The first called missing captions, places pupils in a gallery (your classroom) with images of innovations in flight over the last 115 years posted around the walls. Unfortunately, overnight the captions have come away from the images. Pupils are given an envelope containing the captions and have to work out which caption goes with which image. But they mustn’t let anyone else know, so they write it down in secret .
When the whole class is happy that the right captions have been chosen selected pupils attach them to the photographs. They then agree that it would be best to have the images in chronological order so volunteers are asked to peg them on a washing line in the correct order. This reinforces work from session 1. The next activity asks pupils to work out as many changes as they can from the first to the last picture. When these have been discussed we move to the final activity known as spectrum. Pupils are given between 5 and 8 changes that have happened, many of which they will already have mentioned. Their task is to work out whether the changes were: quite important; important or really important and card describing the change onto the most appropriate place on the spectrum template provided. This really helps pupils to think about significance.
