Day two tomorrow when the second half of the year group (150 children) go out onto Dartmoor to investigate the landscape and decided if it is a ‘theme park’, or wilderness.
There has been an interesting resistance for people to regard places like Dartmoor as a ‘theme park’. Even though i have found it to be a completely managed landscape. But still don’t want to influence the young people in their decisions.
We are changing the day a little after consideration to the last outing. The activities on the tor went very well, so we’ll keep those the same. But later when they are back at school reflecting on their experiences, we will adapt a couple of the tasks. There was a bit of a issue downloaded all the photos for them to edit and label (they were asked to select just six photos that summed up the area and caption them). This time we will use the previous set of photos, so they will already be on the system ready for teachers to use. Secondly the writing and mapping tasks will be broken down and spelt out in more detail for teachers to follow. Surprisingly some teachers had a little difficulty understanding what precisely to do with these tasks (students were asked to draw a map of where they’d visited and then to sum up the area in twelve words or less). I think it was basically down to how we tend to complicate things, that they thought there was more to it then there was.
