RIVER LONG PROFILE

On my main PGCE placement  I taught a very mixed year 10 group with whom I had a double lesson every week. I have mixed feelings about lessons that are two hours long, often being thankful for the amount I can get through with a GCSE group, whilst living in fear of how I will keep them engaged. It is a challenge to prevent them from becoming passive learners, especially in the latter stages of a lesson on, say, sediment transfer in river systems (I find it hard to grip 14 year olds on the issue of sediment size, especially once you throw the phrase “drop its load” into the equation). So, needless to say it was suggested by one of my flatmates that another cake could be just the ticket (I think she had ulterior motive given she had licked the bowls following the volcano adventures).

Method

Again this cake used the basic rectangular brownie, with just a little cut off the end this time – enough to provide triangles for a mountain range. For this model, you need to incorporate the landforms and processes that are relevant to the age group you want to use it with.

The one shown in the picture used the following:

·         Apricot jam brushed onto brownie mountains sprinkled over with desiccated coconut (snow)
·         Blue butter icing (river, sea)
·         Green and blue icing tubes (irrigation systems)
·         Crystallised ginger (beach/coastal material)
·         Chocolate sprinkles (carried sediment/debris from flood event)

The only real building here is the mountains (use same method as volcanoes) and digging out the river channel and sea (enough to spread icing on without raising sea level above land!) the rest is really decoration.

Application

Having been studying River Systems for a few weeks, the year 10s new their stuff pretty well, but were struggling to consolidate the long profile as we had taught it very much in chunks of cross profiles. So, to begin threading together these processes and landforms into one combined and active system we used the cake in the 10 minute “break” in the middle of the double lesson. It started off a bit more teacher led than the volcano plenary, with an explanation that helped them draw together the different sections of the river into a long profile.

Then it was their turn, and in a similar way to the volcano, a piece of cake was only received for a relevant contribution! Students could choose a piece of the cake to name/describe/explain and then got that piece of cake. They had their mid-lesson comfort break and ate cake happily until I dragged them back in for the second half…back to sediment size then…

This design has potential as a series of cross-sectional models too. The one I made did this to a degree but it was on a fairly mini scale. If you were to make this on a massive scale (quite how you would transport it to school I do not know, perhaps someone in Resistant Materials could custom make you a large board, hmm? In fact…) you could make your river channel deeper downstream, add in meanders and ox-bow lakes, make the outside of the bend deeper…the possibilities are quite endless. Of course there’s nothing to suggest it couldn’t be transformed into a Bangladesh case study cake, with three river channels, a delta, and mobile settlements affected by annual flooding events, and perhaps a rising sea level?

VOLCANOES

Having recently read Hywell Roberts’ excellent book Oops! Helping children learn accidentally (https://twitter.com/HYWEL_ROBERTS) I can happily reflect on how when building that first ridiculous volcano I accidentally managed to create a main vent using the “icing glue”. This led me to try building the next volcano cake around an icing-filled magma chamber and vent, and even attempted a secondary vent and bulge…

 

Here I must credit my auntie Anna for her longstanding and well used brownie recipe, which has proven a staple part of the Educake process. It is the perfect consistency for building and lasts well! Unfortunately until I get her permission, I may be at risk of excommunication if I share this family recipe with you…

Method

The chocolate brownie mix is baked in a rectangular tin. Then when it has cooled, cut off a section to turn it into a square. KEEP THE SPARE as this will become your mountain.  In the middle of your square, cut out a circular ‘basin’ in the cake, making sure you don’t go through the whole thing!

Make a butter icing and add red food colouring (enough so it is as red not pink as possible, we wouldn’t want our GCSE students thinking magma and lava is the colour of their little sister’s My Little Pony) then spoon or pipe this into the basin. Cut some of the spare brownie into triangles (this allows you to build sloping edges) and place around the edges of the icing, almost in a Stone-Henge way but without any gaps! Leave a hole in the middle where you will start to pipe in more icing and create your main vent. From now, you need to alternate between building the sloping sides and piping your icing into the hole in the middle, until you have a traditional composite volcano with an icing-filled magma chamber and vent.

NB: to create a secondary vent, simply pipe icing out from the main vent in between two of the horizontal layers of brownie, and squidge brownie around it!

To finish, simply choose your “decoration”! I covered the rest of the square in green icing to represent fertile agricultural land, and used chocolate pieces and sprinkles to demonstrate pumice, tefra etc. You could get creative and try to demonstrate lahars with some melted chocolate, and if anyone has any suggestions how you could incorporate a pyroclastic flow I am all ears!

Application

The most successful use of this cake to date was as a plenary with a group of year 7s. They had been learning about tectonics and spent a lesson doing short activities on the characteristics of a volcano. They had seen me bring the ‘mystery bag’ into the classroom and I had used it as motivation (read bribery) for working well and finishing on time to discover the contents of said bag. I gathered them around it about 15 minutes before the end of the lesson and slowly removed the cake – much to my pleasure there was an audible gasp!

I proceeded to explain that for every student who asked or answered a question a piece of cake would be the reward. Starting with features visible on the cake as a whole we went through the information we had learnt so far, applying it to what they could see, and some of them showed they also had additional or prior knowledge of volcanoes.

The real purpose of developing this cake (I have now made it 4 times) was to end up with a whole cake, but also an accurate cross sectional model when the cake was cut in half. So ensued another 5 minutes, verbally labelling and annotating the cross-section before I began to cut away at the cake and send children back to their seats with a napkin of volcano.

And for the record: I did this as an NQT when I was being observed by someone from the local authority, and with a fairly normal (if such a thing exists) group of students. The risk paid off and for all the possible dangers that were involved in that task, the students were engaged and I don’t think I have done as effective a lesson-ending since. Whether that says more about the cake or my plenary prowess I will let you decide…