Lesson 9 - The Antarctic Treaty and protecting cold environments (As cold as ice)

Lesson 9 - an introduction to the Antarctic Treaty that goes through the main aims of the treaty and focuses on students writing information in their own words. Diamond ranking gets the students to prioritise the information and then a thinking chain is provided to help students explain in detail. The lesson ends by creating a set of guidelines for people visiting Antarctica.

This is a scheme of work about cold environments / polar places. It is designed to work in a completely mixed ability classroom and therefore is differentiated wherever necessary and includes challenge/extension questions. It includes the following topics:
- Where cold environments are and what they are like
- How people use cold environments
- What a glacier is and how it forms
- How glaciers change the landscape by creating corries, aretes and pyramidal peaks
- A comparison of the Arctic and Antarctic and why they are so cold
- Food chains, food webs and the wider importance of plankton at the bottom of the food chain
- Snowball earth and the idea of ice ages with varying amounts of ice on the planet
- The Antarctic treaty
- How cold places are changing, focusing on ice shelf collapse and sea level rise