Geographical Literacy Series

"From my experience in the geography classroom, students have similar problems expressing themselves clearly & coherently in a geographical writing style. In the past I was quick to prescribe geographical writing as an activity without explicitly teaching it in a careful sequence of logical steps. I have assumed that students will pick up geographical writing skills through some sort of osmosis. However, extended writing is one of the hardest tasks we can ask students to do. And my own anecdotal evidence suggests that very few students become good geographic writers on their own." - Lee O'Donnell.

Feb. 7th : This webinar will cover practical strategies to improve our students geographic writing abilities at Junior Cycle. The ideology behind this will be to improve geographic writing at JC level as this should provide a solid foundation & translate to Senior Cycle. 

Feb 21st: This webinar will cover practical strategies to improve our students geographic writing abilities at Senior Cycle. All activities will be viewed through the lens of improving SRP writing for the LC exam.  

Feb 28th: The act of reading is extremely complex but because it is processed by our brains in a millisecond, we sometimes take it for granted as a simple act. Reading fluency is foundational for successful teaching across all subjects. However, ‘reading like a geographer’ poses significant problems for our students. When reading geographic informative text, we must consider what vocabulary and background knowledge students will need to access the text. Additionally, students need to be able to apply an analytical perspective to the text. This means that they need to look at the subject from a range of viewpoints; political, environmental, social & economic. Furthermore, students will also need to be able to seek out trends and patterns with these viewpoints in mind.

This webinar will provide teachers with practical strategies to help students understand a wide range of geographic texts with technical vocabulary & high density of facts by guiding them to identify patterns & structures of the text.