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?