Social+Studies

Social Studies/ Science [|Using Google Spreadsheet to collate data on rainfall around World to Explore Importance of the River Nile] In a Year 5/Grade 4 class during a History lesson, in which we were exploring why the River Nile is so important to Egypt. I posed the question quite openly and asked the children to explore some climate data about different world cities in order to refer it against some of the major cities in Egypt. I have embedded the spreadsheet below. Each child was given a few different cities to explore and using our class laptop resource they independently investigated average rainfall, temperature etc. They added the results into the correct sheet and as we all worked we were able to see the other results popping up. At the end of the session I posed the main enquiry once again, “Why was/is the River Nile so important to Egypt?” I asked the children to use the “Discuss” tab (top right, next to “Share” and “Publish”) and to write their answers in the instant messaging tool. Once they had added their response I asked them to join me looking at responses with a data projector to finish the session. The “Discuss” tool allowed me to quickly collate all of the children’s thoughts into one place and display them to discuss. It proved to be a good focused activity to finish the independent session and it generated some interesting points to discuss in the plenary. media type="custom" key="606889"