"Look at it this way"

After  a busy year of blogging, I'm taking a break for the Christmas and New Year period. There may be some circumstances under which I will return, as something majorly geographical could happen before the 1st of January, but if not, have a peaceful break everyone and look forward to blogging through 2013 with you.... Image shared under CC license by Flickr user calsidyRose

How about this for a great way to teach about landscape: by creating your own ? Does this image mean anything to you ? If not, then you've probably never heard of MINECRAFT: a game that has millions of players worldwide and is finding its way into lots of schools too. My son LOVES Minecraft and has produced some amazing creations on the Pocket Edition that we have on the two tablets in the house. He and his sister play together in a creative world they have generated. When I upgrade my computer in the New Year, we will put the full version on, and really start to explore the Minecraft Universe. Recently, after a Twitter exchange with Claire Rafferty in Australia, I created a Google Doc and started to put together a summary document which could form the basis for Geography teachers to start to think about how they could use Minecraft in the Geography classroom... and also explore where it was being used in other parts of the curriculum, and also as an extra-curricular...

I was reminded of this excellent book by a tweet from @Landscapism It described the use of the word palimpsest to describe a landscape. It's a phrase that I use when talking about landscapes, although it's usually qualified, in the same way as Richard Mabey does, by saying that the landscape rarely starts again - elements of the past remain stubbornly and reappear.... The rains of the last few months have shown up in many areas the routes of previous watercourses and drainage which farmers tried to suppress.... One to read over Christmas perhaps...

The first of two mentions for my village in the local paper today. The first relates to the planning application for a SOLAR FARM. This is an alternative renewable energy proposal to WIND ENERGY , and one that students could perhaps get involved in assessing for its potential benefits and problems for the local landscape. There were some objections to the plan which received approval today, but also some good points made in its favour of course. You can read the application, which includes a full appraisal of the site in the document which is linked to later in this blogpost. One of the factors that had to be considered is the impact on local drainage. I pass the proposed site occasionally - it is not on what could be called a main route - and it is sloping, but doesn't appear to have the same drainage issues as other fields which have received a lot of rainfall in recent months. If you have suitable digital mapping software, you can visit the proposed site at  TF 87517 2...

From the excellent  LANDSCAPISM blog  from 2011 comes a useful list of landscape-based music. There are some useful pieces of music and other soundscapes. The work of Chris Watson features heavily, which is not surprising. Chris Watson's music is available on Spotify, and there are a few albums of his on there - well worth listening to. I was interested to see a collaboration with Robert MacFarlane that he did recently. You can listen to this via the embedded player here: I have a few ideas of my own which I've come across during 2012. I'll add them to a future blogpost. Try the Landscape of Music too - interesting map concept... Image: Winter Sky, Alan Parkinson

This idea came to me just now. I was searching for an image of me for a background to a slide, and this image popped up. I wondered why for a second then realised that my name: ALAN is contained within the name 'ZeALANd' in New Zealand. I started wondering whether there were other names hidden in the names of countries or cities. Can you find and suggest any other 'placenames' ? Perhaps this could be set as an alternative homework activity. If nothing else, it will get students looking at an atlas...

Explore the geology that underlies your local landscapes with this free map tool from BGS

I enjoyed reading this post from the SOME LANDSCAPES blog , which is on my blog reading list... It mentions the descriptions of the landscape used in E Annie Proulx's classic 'The Shipping News'. If nothing else, it stirred me from my seat to find it on my bookshelves, and consider re-reading it. I read it when it first came out, which I now see was nearly 10 years ago !

There are many hill figures dotted around the UK. I've been up to quite a few of them, including the famous Cerne Abbas giant with his large...er... well you know. The Digimap for Schools blog has a nice idea for students: to design their own hill figure using the annotation tools in Digimap for Schools. Check it out and have a go yourself...

A few years ago I read (and blogged about) a book by Julian Baggini called ' Welcome to Everytown'. In it, he described spending a year in the postcode which apparently had the most 'average' characteristics of any postcode area. It turned out to be the postcode where I was born and brought up, to the east of Rotherham. Julian has now moved on to another place which has resonance for the people of England. He spent a week in August as writer-in-residence at the White Cliffs of Dover. In an article for the Times, he talks about the various views that people have about the cliffs. Are they a supportive icon of Britishness, or a symbol of exclusion ? What do they mean for different people ? Julian has also written this piece in The Guardian which is worth reading. This would be relevant for the lesson 'Living on the Edge'. Image by Flickr user HBarrison and shared under CC license, for which many thanks...

Published on 12th of November Available to buy on Amazon... ‘The Ice Man is a great cross-curricular text for science, geography and history. The book is an excellent length and packed full of interesting info.’ Fiona Dyson, Southfields Academy

CPRE have some great resources on their site, and have recently added a new section. The countryside and the city - how can we tell them apart ? There are going to be 6 speeches to listen to. These would perhaps be most useful for older students. The first two are there at the time of posting.... They are by Andrew Motion and Frances Pryor.... Useful for landscape - links to the idea of changes and different impacts on the landscape....

In early November  (later this week in fact), I'm going to be heading down to Somerset for the Somerset Geography Conference. I'm doing a session on my KS3 Toolkit book on landscapes (with updates) and ideas about teaching about landscapes. This will include mentions of the White Cliffs of Dover, Ash dieback, Brave and other Pixar films, burger boxes, Google Earth and other things.... The conference has been developed with a lot of work from Noel Jenkins, who has put together a great line-up for the conference. Sadly, like the SAGT conference at the weekend (see separate blog post), Iain Stewart was unable to attend as he had been allowed permission to film in Turkmenistan, which apparently is rare, but had to be this week. Don't forget that this award-winning Toolkit book has a blog to support it - as with many of my books, such as the Badger GCSE book which has its own blog HERE. If you can't make that event, you now have the option to join me for a virtu...

A landscape feature in Wiltshire is going to be turned into a giant breast by an artwork. The aim is to raise awareness of breast cancer, as well as being an artwork in itself involving special illuminations.... Long Knoll will be transformed by the artwork. Read the story on the BBC NEWS website here. Another similar illuminated experience happens locally to where I live. It's called Electric Forest , and involves special lighting of Thetford Forest ... I'm about to book some tickets for the family to experience it in December...

A flaneur is a wanderer: the term is linked to the idea of psychogeography.... The ROBOT FLANEUR wanders randomly through a city of your choice and displays Street View images... Made by James Bridle Explore the following cities: London San Francisco Manhattan Sao Paulo Paris Berlin Johannesburg Tokyo City Mexico Via Urban Photo Blog on Twitter I can think of lots of ways of using this to explore urban geography and comparisons between cities in different parts of the world... A sort of slighty redacted and randomised version of MAPCRUNCH , my session starter of choice...

One link in a piece that I read this morning led me to a blog, which led me to another and so on... Came across plenty of blogs out there on the theme of LANDSCAPES , which may provide some ideas for possible classroom activities. Landscapism  by Eddie Procter  has some interesting postings... There's a useful gazetteer of landscape sites and resources... and a list of landcape reading. Also a good post on the differences between rural and urban. One of the most useful features of the blog is down the left hand column, where there are links to a wide range of further blogs and websites with a good chunk of geography in there... These would reward further exploration...

"Every hour spent reading is an hour spent learning to write". Robert MacFarlane - author of 'The Wild Places' and 'The Old Ways'

In a month's time I'm going to be heading down to the Somerset Geography Conference. As it happens I'm going to be taking the Geography Collective Spaceship as my mode of transport as Dan Raven Ellison and I are involved in the afternoon session. I shall also be talking about teaching about landscapes. This is based on my KS3 Toolkit book, which is still available to purchase from the GA shop of course, and for which this blog was set up. If you want to find out more about how I developed the book and put it together and ideas for teaching about landscapes with the latest ideas thrown in, please get in touch. Noel Jenkins has put together a cracking line-up for the event. Head to the Somerset Geography Posterous pag e for more details. Hope to see some of you there...

Exploring the landscape means getting outside the classroom... We are delighted to announce that the Geography Collective has been shortlisted for a Learning outside the Classroom award. We would be even more delighted if you would consider voting for us, especially if you have been enthused by our Mission:Explore books, app or website, or perhaps been visited by us, seen us at Glastonbury, Latitude or the Hay Festival, ridden on buses in Suffolk, cycled along Sustrans routes in many cities, explored the Great Glen with Discover Explore or in some other geographical context... We're going to be on the road in the next few months, and also will be running our Geography Camp in December , of which more later... Please click the link and give us your vote . Thanks :)

Preparing some resources for the course on Geomedia in Salzburg that I am leading next week. You still have chance to get funding to join me for a repeat of the course in February 2013 , and the course is likely to run several times during 2013 - I'd love to see lots of you there... you can get your fees, accommodation and travel paid for. I'm going to be using several activities from two books which I edited, and were published in April this year. I will also be using Paul Berry's adaptation of my Landscape in a Box idea. We'll be doing some fieldwork and there's a photo competition too... You really need to have a copy of these books in your departmental library. They have been selling well, and getting good feedback from users. You can order them from the GA shop - click to follow the link, and remember that GA members get a discount on purchases, and free P&P Multimedia made Easy by Paul Cornish GIS made Easy by Bob Lang

...with several prominent features... The Giant Naked Lady of Cramlington (let's see if this blog post makes it past the filters...) is opening in October as part of an attraction called Northumberlandia ... A bold new landscape feature... It has been created by the Land Trust.  Admission is FREE. There is a viewpoint where the feature will reveal itself to the visitor, and plenty of walks - it's difficult to see the whole feature and it will change as people walk through it... Go to the website to download a rather nice MAP and LEAFLET in PDF format. Might make a useful new tourism case study if you're in the area... I'll definitely pop in the next time I'm passing....

A year ago, I was just coming to terms with the (premature) end of my job at the Geographical Association after three wonderful years, and decided to try things out as a freelance geographer: author, consultant, trainer and whatever else people would pay me to do. Here's a visual summary of what I've been up to, made with Tagxedo As it happens, my extensive networking over the previous decade meant that I had a few projects to start in on, the Geography Collective was going from strength to strength, and I was fortunate to get a temporary contract managing the OU's VITAL CPD portal. Paula Owens involved me in a writing job for the BBC, and together we produced a major resource for the Digimap for Schools for EDINA. Thanks also to Richard Allaway, who asked me to write content for his Geography all the Way website and collaborate on an innovative series of eBooks, the first of which is now available to download from the iBookstore. The writing work I did for the RG...

A nice quote by Katherine Sarafian, the producer of 'Brave' on the importance of research when starting to plan the film: We started this journey, right here in Edinburgh, about six years ago, on a research trip, because it's research, research, research. Pixar start in the truest sense of where you want to begin the story, which is by touching the rocks and the heather and the lichen, and breathing the air, and seeing the weather changes. Update I went to see the film on Friday afternoon while down in Kent for a long weekend, and really enjoyed it. It helped that it was at an Odeon rather than my usual fleapit (no offence) so had HD image quality, and surround sound and good seats... The animation of the landscape was fantastic, particularly the scenes where Merida rides quickly through it, or the rain falls, or the fishing scene in the river... There was the humour of the little half-heard comments, such as when the warriors all climb to the top of the high tower...

Recognise this coastal landscape ? What geographical features can you see ? It's taken from the BBC's animated Olympics trail that has been shown repeatedly for the last few weeks. What other landscapes does it contain ? Click to enlarge - Image copyright: BBC

That's the (difficult) question on this BBC page. Here were the standings at the time when I cast my vote...

Have blogged several times about the work of Richard Long and the connection with landscapes. The recent road race around Box Hill has a few other geographical connections, such as the Olympics geocaches that had been hidden by Sam Atkins and pupils at the Priory School, Portsmouth. Came across this video of the artwork being made: Road Graffiti, which is inspired by the graffiti written on the roads during the Tour de France. Also has connections with other artworks made by Long.

Danny Boyle's opening ceremony for the London Olympics has been in the news today, as there was a practice run last night. It turns out that three people I know attended the event, but they've promised to #savethesecret although I did a search on #ruinthesecret and found a few pictures. It's no surprise that the ceremony is based around a pastoral view of England. The Evening Telegraph used the headline 'Farm Olympics' when the first pictures were released. Now Henry Porter, writing in the Observer  says that the event made him fall in love with our landscape all over again. This may be a resource that is worth deconstructing once it's over, in terms of its description of our landscape... It's certainly an interesting Cultural Geographical event...

BBC News article from a week or so ago. There were plans to put turbines onto Docking Shoal , which is close in to the North Norfolk coast, but these have been rejected because of the nesting terns nearby. There are two further wind farms which have been given permission: Race Bank and Dudgeon. Fits with Lesson 4 and 5 which focus on changes to the landscape.

Noel Jenkins recently shared a KS3 Geography 'Fantasy' scheme that he had put together... It's great to see that in the Year 7, there's a healthy dose of Landscapes. You can still get your copy of ' Look at it this Way' from the GA ONLINE SHOP - now with free delivery.... Take a look at the SoW and see where you can fit landscapes into your KS3...

Take the opportunity over the summer to explore an (un)familiar landscape a little more... I'll be heading for Devon. In North Devon there is a chance to take part in a special Mission:Explore set of missions , which have already been attempted almost 400 times (at the time of writing) Many landscapes have a designation as an AONB , and this would be a useful context for exploring landscapes... There's plenty on these 'landscapes for life' at the AONB page. Could be a great context for KS3...

I spent a pleasant few hours earlier today in the valley of the Gaywood River , just east of King's Lynn with colleagues from UEA and the Norfolk Wildlife Trust. We were involved in testing out an augmented reality solution for allowing visitors to a place to find out more about the nature's benefits / ecosystem services in that area. Sarah Taigel has created, and is trialling an application called VesAR which stands for Visualising Ecosystem Services using Augmented Reality. It uses an app called LAYAR , which I have previously experimented with.  Holding the phone or tablet up at particular locations reveals 'hotspots' floating in the camera view, which contain more information about what the visitor is looking at. (See the image below) Ecosystem services are split into three types: Regulating Provisioning Cultural Essentially, a landscape like the river catchment we walked through provides three types of benefits, e.g. a regulating benefit w...

There's an exhibition on at the British Library which I plan to visit over the next month or so. Wastelands to Wonderlands explores the different ways that Britain has been represented in fiction over the years, and contains many manuscripts and other materials. There's plenty here that's relevant to teaching about landscapes, and the way they are represented. I'm grateful to Angus Willson for the loan of the exhibition catalogue in advance of my visit.

Preparing some materials for a course in a few week's time. It's being held at the HQ of travel company Discover the World. The course is being run along with Simon Ross , who produced a number of books that I made heavy use of when teaching, particularly his mapskills book. The theme is Developing a Global Sense of Place at KS3 and GCSE. I'm exploring KS3. There are quite a few areas that I could focus on as PLACE is a key concept in geography, and the idea of visiting places is central to the work of Discover the World. As always, once the germ of an idea comes to me, it's time to flesh it out with various resources and web tools. I have put together two sessions which will eventually be shared on Slideshare. Interestingly, the OFSTED Subject Report on Geography, published in 2011 , made a series of recommendations. The first was that  schools should: focus strongly on developing pupils’ core knowledge in geography, particularly their sense of place ...

Listen again to this BBC Radio 3 programme from last night on BBC iPLAYER Lyz Turner's house, in the East Yorkshire town of Withernsea, is falling into the sea. "My house has started talking to me," she says. "It produces haunting sounds like far-off women wailing." This programme, combining interviews with music and the sounds of the sea, the wind, the land, the dying houses, explores how people cope with natural calamity: with anger, stoicism, distress, and art. One winter, Ron and Judith Backhouse watched as first their fence, then their shed, and finally three trees slipped over the cliff at the bottom of their garden on a private estate above Scarborough. "The crack is running up towards our next door neighbour's house," says Ron. "It's maybe five or ten metres away from his bungalow now and we're connected to him. So if he goes, we go, too."? Artist Kane Cunningham bought a condemned bungalow on the same estate...

Always been a fan of Richard Long' s work, and the way that it links to landscape. He also went to St. Martin's like my wife :) There's an exhibition of his work on in Wakefield, which I shall try to get to the next time I am up in Yorkshire. This article describes hos career and work. "The landscapes that I have chosen to work in are the landscapes that still cover most of this earth; the world is still basically an empty place."

Thanks to Keir Clarke for tipoff to another useful site which merges a range of different media. 200 Towns allows you to explore 200 towns. A useful new 'Perspective on British Landscape' ?

Coastal landscapes feature in the book in the Chapter 'Living on the Edge'. One of the downsides of Twitter is that it has made me want to buy loads more books which I can't afford to keep doing. The latest tipoff came via Joe Moran. I've enjoyed both of Joe's books that I've read, particularly 'On Roads' , which I think is due a re-read. He suggested that he had enjoyed Jean Sprackland 's book on 'Strands'. There was also a nice spot of feedback in that reading the preview section that's available on Amazon there's a nice quote by Joe Moran to describe a beach... It is 'a frontier not only between water and solid ground, but also between the wild and the domestic'.

Listen to Simon Armitage  in particular in this clip, which relates to the British Library exhibition on landscape and literature. It's on my list of things to do in the next few months when I'm in London. There are other clips too, which I discovered via the excellent SOME LANDSCAPES blog , which is a very useful bookmark for anyone interested in culture and landscape....

Surprised to find that my copy of the new Robert MacFarlane 'The Old Ways' arrived today, although it's not supposed to be out until the 7th of June. Not that I'm complaining... Started reading it straight away... was supposed to be saving it for summer.

Another news item on the increasing yellowness of the British countryside, as featured in the toolkit book...

A new Robert MacFarlane book comes out next month... I enjoyed this Spectator Review An excellent quote from the book: Landscape is still often understood as a noun connoting fixity, scenery, an immobile painterly decorum. I prefer to think of the word as a noun containing a hidden verb: landscape scapes, it is dynamic and commotion-causing, it sculpts and shapes us not only over the courses of our lives but also instant by instant, incident by incident. I prefer to take ‘landscape’ as a collective term for the temperature and pressure of the air, the fall of light and its rebounds, the textures and surfaces of rock, soil and building, the sounds (cricket-screech, bird cry, wind through trees), the scents (pine resin, hot stone, crushed thyme) and the uncountable other transitory phenomena and atmospheres that together comprise the bristling presence of a particular place at a particular moment. This would fit in really nicely when planning how to teach about the landscape usin...

Just remembered today that Lac Leman in Geneva, pictured below was the Lake referred to in the title of one of my favourite pieces of music: Mike Oldfield's 1984 classic... Image: Alan Parkinson I remember this being an important piece of music when I was in my final year of undergraduate studies, when you had to chase down music... Picture taken a week last Thursday on the shores of the lake in glorious sunshine... Listen to it now, turn the speakers up loud... What are your favourite pieces of music that are connected to landscape features ?? Mike has done quite a few, including Mount Teide ....

Chapter 9 and 10 of the book feature the Southern Alps of New Zealand, and a lesson which involves applying for a job with a company that flies tourists into Milford Sound. Last weekend I was fortunate enough to be in the European Alps for the first time. After years of showing videos on tourism in Chamonix , I was able to wander through the streets of the town, and then head up on the cable car to L'Aiguille du Midi... Enjoy some of my images below... There were quite a few companies offering flights by small plane and helicopter over the Alps, so perhaps you could adapt the lesson to this location instead of using New Zealand, or maybe even a mountain range in the UK....

Underlying the British landscape is its GEOLOGY. This tip is a new feature on the BGS website, which allows the embedding of a UK Geology or Earthquake Map. Details are HERE if you want to make your own... Here's a GEOLOGY map - click on it to show the surface geology... How does this relate to the surface landscape ?

Exploring landscape is important. Exploring the world is even harder... I can finally share some news I heard about a few months ago, but which has now been made public... Daniel Raven Ellison , friend and colleague at the Geography Collective has been named as one of National Geographic's 2012 Emerging Explorers. The press release is here. Dan is given the honour alongside other 'visionary young trailblazers' around the world. The 2012 Emerging Explorers are U.S. cyborg anthropologist  Amber Case ; U.K. digital storyteller and zoologist  Lucy Cooke ; U.K. behavioral ecologist  Iain Couzin ; Mexican underwater archaeologist  Guillermo de Anda ; chemist  Yu-Guo Guo  of China; conservationist  Osvel Hinojosa Huerta  of Mexico; U.S. pilot and educator  Barrington Irving ; conservation biologist  Krithi Karanth  of India; Swiss crisis mapper  Patrick Meier ; U.S. archaeologist  Sarah Parcak ; U.S. data scientist ...

There's an event in London in June where you can hear Robert MacFarlane talk about his new book 'The Old Ways'. I am due to be in London I think on that day and will try to go along if the timings work..... How do the landscapes we love shape the people we are? Why do we walk? Join celebrated travel writer Robert Macfarlane for an evening exploring geography, memory, pilgrimage and adventure. For several years and more than a thousand miles, Macfarlane has been following the vast network of old paths and routes that criss-cross Britain and its waters, and connect them to countries and continents beyond. His journeys have taken him from the chalk downs of southern England to the remote bird-islands of the Scottish north-west, from the disputed territories of Palestine to the pilgrimage routes of Spain and the sacred landscapes of the eastern Himalayas. Along the way – along the ways – he has walked stride for stride with a 5,000-year-old man near Liverpool, followed t...

Lesson 8 in 'Look at it this Way' is called 'Living on the Edge' . It explores the pros and cons of living near the coast... This week there has been publicity of a report which confirmed something that a lot of us already knew - that being beside the seaside makes us cheerful... I was fortunate to live within a mile of the sea for 12 years. Even now, it's only 20 minutes away - in fact we popped over earlier today... Here's a picture of the Norfolk coast from my Flickr stream to cheer your day... Image: Alan Parkinson

We are coming into the period of the year when the countryside begins to turn yellow... This is the field next to my son's Primary school - the distinctive flowers are beginning to appear all around the village... Oilseed rape features in a mystery activity which can be found in Lesson 5 of 'Look at it this Way'.

Word of the Week is just one of the features of the VITAL Geography Portal which I manage. You can check it out and subscribe for just £10.... Here are the entries so far (A-G), some of which will shortly be archived... The locations are the locations of images of each feature which appear on the portal page. Gryke - the name for the gap between the blocks (clints) on a limestone pavement Malham Cove, Yorkshire Dales Fen - a tract of low-lying, marshy land, often drained by humans. Especially refers to the region around the Wash in Eastern England, with areas of Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire The Cambridgeshire Fens Erg - In the Sahara, that part of the desert whose surface is covered in sand (as opposed to the Hammada or rocky uplands, which have been swept clear of sand by the wind Erg Chebbi, Morocco Dirt  cone - a conical accumulation of detritus on a glacier surface - may be up to 2m in height and is often ice cored Solheimajokull Glacier, Iceland - the b...

Another book to add to the list... If this is anything like Robert's other books this will be superb.... Plenty on landscapes and human interactions...

Looking forward to the new Simon Armitage book on the Pennine Way... One for the lessons on the Peak District in 'Look at it this Way'.

Good to see the toolkits for sale on the GA stand at the GA Conference... Head over to LIVING GEOGRAPHY for all the latest from the GA Conference 12th-14th April 2012....

If you can get through the language that is characteristic of Will Self pieces, there are some important geographical messages coming out here in this piece in The Guardian. The recent URBAN EARTH : Degrees of London walk was another reminder of the power of walking as the participants walked into London from HeathrowAirport and other locations. Organised by Dan Raven Ellison of the Geography Collective, the people involved were asked to concentrate on particular things during the walk, as well as look at the city in unexpected ways. While you're walking round the city, you might also be interested in a nice guide called SIDE WALKS . It's one of two nice travel guides produced by Kate Pocrass: an artist living in San Francisco. Some of the ideas have a touch of our Mission:Explore about them. In fact one of the reviewers refers to some of the suggested activities as 'missions'. I liked the idea of eating food in a particular shape, or capturing snippets of con...

On Wednesday 4th April, EDINA released Version 3 of Digimap for Schools , which included a number of new features and enhancements. The new tools and enhancements have been developed directly as a result of valuable user feedback we gained from the user survey we ran last Autumn and from talking to teachers at conferences such as BETT and at training events. New tools and enhancements: National Grid lines overlay  - This new tool allows users to display National Grid lines on screen, over any map at any scale.  Being able to display National Grid lines on the screen is incredibly useful for teaching and learning about grid references.  Grid letters and numbers are displayed clearly, spacing and numbering is scale appropriate and automatically change as a user zooms in or out through the map views.   To view the National Grid line, simply click the button on toolbar. View a ...

For £16.99 (or less with various discounts that you can find online), you could have your very own Custom Made OS map. You can choose from a flat or a folded map. You can choose a 1: 25000 or 1: 50000 scale I recently won a competition organised by OS Leisure (follow their Twitter feed @osleisure for more) and the map opposite is the one that I ordered... It's a rather wonderful thing... and unique...

A few people have mentioned my Toolkit book and the Landscape in a Box idea in the last few days... Paul Berry from Devon mentioned it in a very nice blog post where he also expanded on it by bringing in a few other ideas that have also featured on these pages: Rory's Story Cubes and the use of tiny figures. At Glastonbury in 2010 when working with the Geography Collective , we played 'mini hide and seek' with tiny figures around the Children's field that we were working in, to play around with ideas of scale. If you subscribe to Teaching Geography, you can get the original article. Noel Jenkins has also posted another response to using Landscape in a Box, along with some soundscapes.