"Look at it this way"

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.

Have been following up something from earlier today about the sounds of Sheffield .... Steel, Peach and Tozers (or Steelos) as everyone called it, was the place where my dad started work in the mid 1950s ... He was a draughtsman before moving into engineering role, and moved to a number of other mills, including Hatfields (now Meadowhall) before finishing at Aldwarke Works, Parkgate almost 50 years later... I remember doing a photography project on the area between Rotherham and Sheffield and its dereliction in the late 1980s, after the earlier industrial development, with its attendant environmental implications. Came across an album called THE SONG OF STEEL . Listen to the album on SPOTIFY if you have access to this... One of the things that also features on the disc is the mention of " beer note s ". My dad used to be one of the people who handed out beer notes which could be exchanged at the Temple pub just outside the foundry (which is now a museum called Magna, and ...

The National Trust has released an album of sounds recorded at National Trust properties. The sounds have been assembled and turned into an album by Jarvis Cocker, in association with the National Trust, and make for an engaging soundscape... Visit the site and download your own copy ... How about making a soundtrack album for your school grounds and premises ?

Have mentioned the SOME LANDSCAPES blog before, and if you are teaching about landscapes this is worth adding to your FOLLOW list. The AUTUMN LEAVES sound site is rather good.

The use of SOUND is vital in lessons... I have recently been exploring the work of CHRIS WATSON , via my favourite site SPOTIFY. This allows streaming of the music, or in this case sound stories into the classroom. Check out WEATHER REPORT. This has 3, 18 minute tracks Ol-Olool-O: Kenyan savannah... The Laipach: a Scottish glen in all weathers Vatnajokull: a glacier sailing in Arctic waters The weather has created and shaped all our habitats. Clearly it also has a profound and dynamic effect upon our lives and that of other animals. The three locations featured here all have moods and characters which are made tangible by the elements, and theseperiodic events are represented within by a form of time compression. This is Chris's first foray into composition using his location recordings of wildlife and habitats -- previously he has been concerned with describing and revealing the special atmosphere of a place by site specific, untreated location recordings. For the first time here...

Listen to the Lough ... Radio 4 programme: The Lake - catch it on iPlayer while you can