Antarctica Lesson Plans

These are not whole lesson plans, but they are my ideas of how to use some of the pages on this site.

Subjects - Maths, Geography, ICT

Using the data on one or more of these pages: Antarctica climate graph comparative   Australian stations   Extreme south

Copy and paste the data from one or more tables in an Excel file and use the data to produce different graphs from those given, suggestions:

Whenever I get pupils to plot graphs in Excel, they manage a graph of the right shape ok, but the first attempt gives labels and axes that are meaningless or difficult to understand. Plotting a graph by following the wizard is easy, getting a meaningful result that can be presented understandably to others is much more difficult, so I'd suggest focusing on this aspect of it too. If you don't, then your pupils will have a lot of quickly produced poor graphs.

Alternatively of course, you could print out and use the data to produce graphs using pencil and graph paper.

Subjects - Science, Geography, Citizenship (environmental issues)

Using the links from this page - Antarctic animals - write a summary or construct a Power Point or similar presentation about Antarctic Penguins, Seals, Whales or other birds. Relate to this list of Endangered Antarctic Animals, how are these animals protected? Conservation

Note on Power Point presentations - many pupils like to print these out (in black and white as that's cheaper for the school) and hand them in. I prefer to get them emailed to me in school when I can see the animations and slide change effects. This enables me to mark them for content and also for presentation, I can then email my comments back to the pupil and I have copies of the best ones available to add to the school website so pupils can see each others.

Subjects - History, English

A/  Choose one of the explorers from this pre-amble page Antarctic explorers, follow the links through to the details pages and research-write a diary entry for a single day that might have happened during the expedition.

B/  For the Shackleton expedition using this time line and map page convert the events to coincide with the pupils own life with the end as of today. i.e. work backwards to establish how long ago the expedition would have set off in the pupils life (March when I was in year 6 - for instance) and then fit in with other events. This gives a good idea of how long these expeditions took, putting it into perspective.

C/  Poetry? / Creative writing - Using the pictures for inspiration, describe what it might be like to be there.

Antarctica Project

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