International Literacy Day

On International Literacy Day, here's a reminder of the National Strategies booklet on Functional Skills in Geography, containing 3 contexts to support Literacy, Numeracy and ICT
I wrote the booklet.

Can be downloaded as a PDF from HERE (the original website was helpfully closed down by the coalition government)

A neglected classic resource...

This book is not dangerous....

... but might be useful for those teachers who are preparing to teach about / with FUNCTIONAL SKILLS.... (i.e. all teachers...)

This 24 page booklet is available as a PDF DOWNLOAD from the National Strategies website. It should also be arriving into all schools.

It contains a range of subject-specific (and generic) information on Functional Skills, as well as 3 developed contexts for geography lesson sequences which are as follows:

a) KS3 - Representing landscapes in literature...

b) KS3 - Investigating social inequality

c) KS4 - Consumer choice and natural resources

Oh, did I mention that I wrote it ?

I am grateful to Richard Allaway for pointing out the imminent arrival of a very useful resource to supplement to the bottled water context in the booklet...

Any feedback on the lesson contexts gratefully received - they were severely edited from the original 'vision'...

UPDATE: WEBSITE NOW LIVE
STORY OF BOTTLED WATER

Functional Skills Support Programme

For the last few months, I have been involved in a writing project, which finally finished today, at the Malmaison hotel in Birmingham - not the greatest place to get to from where I live it has to be said...

The project was to produce a Geography booklet: one of a series of 11 to support the secondary National Strategy's Functional Skills Support Programme.

This is supported by the DCSF and LSIS

Functional Skills are "the essential elements of English, mathematics and ICT that equip individuals to operate confidently, effectively and independently in life and work."

Look out for the Geography booklet, which contains 3 suggested lesson sequence contexts for teaching these skills in GEOGRAPHY, in March 2010

Visit the FS SUPPORT website for more details on Functional Skills.

TC: "Social networking" resources..

I am currently producing some materials related to FUNCTIONAL SKILLS.

More on this can be seen on the QCDA website

A pilot has been undertaken and the next phase is the development of some materials to be made available to all schools.

This will include some subject-specific booklets.

It occured to me that in order to cover quite a few of these skills, not just the ICT skills, that two excellent resources produced by my geography community colleague Tony Cassidy would probably be useful.

The resources take the shape of a template to produce a FACEBOOK-style "profile"

The profile is for a geographical context: a landform, city, development indicator, famous person, body of water... etc.

The template is here:

What if they had a Facebook profile?

View more presentations from TonyCassidy.

And followed shortly after by a TWITTER template, also produced by the inimitable Tony...

Twitter Starter Template

View more presentations from TonyCassidy.

Quality stuff...

UPDATE: Here is some fantastic work by Year 9 students from Seaford Head Community College, who used the idea in their Geography lessons with Miss Smith. I love these. Thanks for sharing. I'd love to see some other examples...

Facebook and Twitter Profiles

View more presentations from Liz Smith.