X26: What drives change?

Students in Year 10 at XP have made a wonderful start to their latest expedition titled ‘Ch, ch, changes which has the guiding question; ‘what drives change?’. Our focus for the expedition is the Viking expansion across Europe where students have begun working as historians to examine the Vikings leaving the homelands as they became raiders and invaders in new lands. In science, students began their immersion by examining some challenging academic texts which discussed the chemical and physical properties of the fabled Ulfberht swords. To fully understand what made these and other viking artefacts so special, students are working as scientists and archeologists to first understand the structure of the atom and the principles that underpin the periodic table. From here, students will study structure and bonding and understand chemical reactions so that the can fully understand viking artefacts and discover what this tells us about the Vikings as a people. From here we will be able to articulate what drives both chemical change and historical change through the artefacts left behind.

This weeks sessions have begun with the long term learning target: I can use the periodic table to determine the properties of different elements and relates this to their atomic structure. We have used a collaborative approach to understanding the principles behind the periodic table where we gave groups manipulatives which needed high quality, academic conversations to uncover the mathematical patterns found in the periodic table. This was framed as one of our ‘grapples’ where students are given a challenging problem that they must work together to figure out and overcome. This approach is inspired by mastery teaching in mathematics and the evidence based approaches to teaching for deeper instruction in one of the schools key Expeditionary Learning texts ‘Learning that Lasts’. Our students did and incredible job working collaboratively, ensuring we were all Crew, not passengers and were successful in determining the principles behind the periodic table. From here, some students were even able to predict the atomic number, electron configuration and properties of unknown elements based on what they had discovered so far! Our next job is to practice remembering this so we stay exam ready!

A really impressive start from Year 10, looking forward to the rest of the expedition!

Mr Voltaire

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