Skip to main content

Topic planning

I thought I'd do a bit of cloud-sourcing, ask my PLN to help me with some planning ideas that I've got milling around my head.

The topic is, rather morbidly, DEATH, and I was hoping that some people could help me with enough ideas to last a term. Please have a look at the topic web below. It is in its infancy & will develop over time, but feel free to add ideas to it, I'll upload them as soon as I can.

Thanks in advance!


Read some of the Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

Comments

  1. AnonymousTuesday, December 21, 2010 4:28:00 pm

    forms that childrens writing ..
    letters to someone already dead 'my .. will be joining you soon'
    Maths - when i was in junio4 we did our stats fieldwork in local graveyard - age at death, no of people per grave, age differences etc - that beat the hell out of counting lorries

    ReplyDelete
  2. Colin GrahamTuesday, December 21, 2010 4:37:00 pm

    You could look at death rituals, funeral rites etc. Early Stone Age burials giving hints to present-day about prehistoric society.

    Sacrifice/martyrdom - death as a religious act

    Death as an end, as a transition, as a rebirth

    Poetry/songs/art/music related to death - obviously requiem masses, Christian icons of saints and martyrs, but also pop culture - reworking of candle in the wind for Princess Di, etc...

    Should be enough to get going, Jim!

    ReplyDelete
  3. UnknownTuesday, December 21, 2010 4:37:00 pm

    Thanks Mike, love the idea of going to a graveyard for statistics!!

    ReplyDelete
  4. PrimarypeteTuesday, December 21, 2010 4:52:00 pm

    You'd have to be careful how to tread but i'd really recommend PSHE wise going into loss the children have had in their lives, pets, grandparents etc. It's something everyone in life has to deal with but very seldom do children get the chance to talk about it and learn skills to deal with loss and grief. Assuming there was nothing 'major' in your class you could extend loads into Literacy work. Could create some great flashback stories. Or more controversially you could create diaries of the last days of someone's life, or even have the narrator of their story being the dead character playing through the story of someone else’s life. Although that could be a little morbid!
    Could go into any war with it, current ones in Afghanistan for example.
    You could set up a ‘CSI’ department for Science / History. Could link that to your Literacy story work. I.E. CSI investigations show various plot elements, children piece together (so it’s more enquiry based).
    I’ll add more later if I think of any :)

    ReplyDelete
  5. SarahTuesday, December 21, 2010 4:58:00 pm

    If it was me I'd have to include the village of Trunyan, Bali.

    A cave you can only get to by boat with bodies in bamboo cages, an altar with skulls and bones piled up under the shade of an immense banyan tree on the shore of a lake which is overlooked by a volcano. The most amazing burial ground I've ever visited! Do a google image search for 'Trunyan'.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

100WCGU wk #20

The prompt this week is to use at least one of these for inspiration. …the powers that be  /  the apple of his eye  /   the writing on the wall… It was early in the Autumn When she took herself away. The trees in our orchard cried leaves for her; She was the apple of their eye , their Mistress. She said it was, "Inevitable". Powers that be had deemed it so and so it was Fruitless to pursue it. Her one way trip. The marks of her passing are writ large on the cold orchard wall s. They are writ larger, though, in me.
22 comments
Read more

100 WCGU wk 21

This week's challenge is a picture prompt. I quite like picture prompts, they allow so many tangents. Our classrooms are windows. Children's views are shaped by the pictures we paint, the opportunities they envisage. We are responsible for the window's upkeep: treat it with consistent care and attention and it will open seamlessly to worlds that are beyond their wildest dreams; leave it untouched and those worlds will remain forever out of reach.  The window is open to the world to view, some outsiders simply point out what is missing from times they spent inside. Others like to castigate and deride. Most smile knowingly, remembering with fondness the people who opened windows for them. People like us.
14 comments
Read more

Independent Learning

This evening on #ukedchat, the discussion was about 'independent learning' or 'IL' and it's importance in the curriculum. In my opinion IL is an umbrella title, one so multi-faceted that we probably need to invest a lot of time determining the rationale behind it. One point that came across was from Miles Berry that Independent Learning is something innate, present from birth as a survival mechanism so teaching it is contradictory. This is something that I agree with and yet we are in a system that has institutionalised our lives to the point where children are taught out of this. They become so reliant on being told what, when and how to do things, that they forget what they are genetically programmed to do. And there's my mistake. I'm talking about these children in the third person. The point is that we have all fallen into the habit of providing knowledge as teachers. There is no blame associated with this, we are as caught up in the status quo as
4 comments
Read more