Jody's+comments+re+Year+8

Coming to this course fresh this year it is lovely to engage with the kids with such 'gory' content! They love murders, death, plagues, pestilence etc - and especially torture!

Could we incorporate Ancient Rome as a compartitive study with Greece (study them in parallel) in Year 7 and leave more time vacant here for other comparative studies here - eg. castles in Europe with castles in Japan, as Di suggested? I don't think it is completely feasible to drop some of these topics, as they are fantastic fun and engaging, but I think surely we can bend it a little to incorporate other engaging aspects and snippets of other countries in comparitive timeframes.

I have spent way too much time on the Vikings, and am only really at Medieval Europe in Term 3 - so will certainly be sacrificing as we head towards the exam!!! Can we focus on the Vikings more as a case study of Lindisfarne and perhaps York - and leave their study as that? Then introduce the next topic with the Battle of Hastings? This may leave more time for topics at the end, eg. China. Otherwise it just gets left off.

Also, could we look at a different era of Chinese history rather than ancient? Or could we look at case studies - eg. the Great Wall, inventions, Ming dynasty? Could Di help in developing some of this, as I know I don't have a heap of resources in this regard?

There are crucial things in this year that I would hate to leave off - and I would like to work on developing more skills based activities in PD sessions. I think bouncing ideas about assignment design is crucial too - something we perhaps don't do enough of.