This idea comes from Mari Nicholas’ Year 12 Chemistry lesson. She put an array of pictures on the board, and asked pupils to make connections between them. What I loved was how she introduced the task. She said: “The more esoteric, the more distant the link, the better. Don’t limit yourself to Chemistry.”
Here’s her slide…what links can you make? What pictures could you put up as a starter? They could be pictures representing ideas within a topic, or across different topics, encouraging students to ‘join’ up their learning and expand their thinking beyond the boundaries of the lesson they are in.
This is effective because:
- It is a great way to introduce a topic by encouraging pupil curiosity.
- It could be a fantastic revision task, strengthening students’ schemas, organising interrelated concepts in an efficient and powerful way that can be recalled from the long term memory.
- The task allows for natural differentiation, with students choosing to make more complex or simpler connections.
- It encourages a STEAM mind-set, with students exploring how broad and seemingly different ideas are interrelated.
- It’s also a quick and easy task for the teacher to prepare.