Editorial: Focus on the seasons

Dear colleagues,

With the festive season all but upon us, this month’s editorial takes the seasons as its focus. You’ll find plenty to celebrate this month on onestop!

Christmas
Take a look at this young learners Christmas resource. Pupils work on the topic of Christmas, matching words such as ‘mistletoe’ and ‘candles’ to pictures, and decorating and describing a Christmas tree. They can also create their own Advent calendar to count down to Christmas.

Seasonable weather
There are many great resources for looking at the weather and seasons on onestop. With Weather and seasons arts and crafts, pupils assemble a cut-out to revise the seasons and weather vocabulary, and in the Whether the weather is good …  worksheet and sentence-making challenge students focus on the four seasons, covering weather, temperature, and climate. Hotter and hotter is a great group activity where students discuss the climate and brainstorm ways to prevent global warming.

Seasons and the planet Earth
You can relate the festive time of year to the Earth’s position in the solar system with The Solar System: The Earth, which teaches the movement of the Earth in space. Similarly, in The Earth: Rotation and revolution, students explore the Earth’s movements and explain why we have day, night and different seasons. Another useful resource on this subject is The Sun, the Moon and the Earth, where students complete labelling and true/false exercises which teach the relative positions of the Sun, the Moon and planet Earth and the orbits they travel. Resources like Seasons and trees get young learners to look at how plants and trees change throughout the year. For older students, The Planets offers a series of tasks including algebra, extensive reading and developing students’ own presentations on the solar system.

Seasons and human behaviour
You can remind students of warmer seasons with Tourism in developing countries, an information gap activity increasing students’ awareness of the impact of tourism in less developed countries.

Time and zones
A challenging activity where pupils label pictures of the Earth according to which parts are in sunlight at midday is Time zones around the world, while in this lesson plan on time pupils study different units of time, from seconds to millennia, and practise calculating and telling the time.

And if that wasn’t enough to whet your appetite this season, there is a new TKT article on accommodation strategies and a new secondary reading worksheet entitled Poor Persephone! which is, fittingly, about the myth of Persephone and the seasons.

Enjoy the season, and good will and joy to you all!

Best wishes,

Keith