Christian Head, Kirkby Stephen, Cumbria, CA17 4HA

017683 71693

Kirkby Stephen Grammar School

A Co-operative Academy

A Level Geography

The new geography specification will excite students’ minds, challenge perceptions and stimulate your investigative and analytical skills. As a relevant and dynamic subject it will enable understanding of how the world operates and interacts politically, environmentally and physically. The new units reflects the world today and enables students to analyse the cause and effect of contemporary local and global issues and events as they happen to people and places. The nature of the subject and topics requires many analytical, practical and organisational skills which are essential to university and a range of careers.

Course Content

Glacial Systems and Landscapes - Not only will students understand how cold environments work as a system and how specific processes operate and combine to create distinctive landscapes, but they will also investigate how our fragile cold environments are changing. These changes are already having significant impacts on people’s way of life at a local and global scale.

Hazards - Students will investigate and study the lithosphere and atmosphere and the intermittent but regular hazards that present themselves to human populations, often in a dramatic and sometimes catastrophic fashion. This includes volcanic, seismic and storm events.

Changing Places - Students are required to embed their understanding of places, their qualities and how they change over time, to two contrasting case studies.

Water and the Carbon Cycle - Focus on the major stores of critical water and carbon at or near to the Earth’s surface and the dynamic cyclical relationships associated with them.

Population and environments - The main focus of this topic is on the continuing growth of human populations, associated with economic development and changing lifestyles, which continues to be a defining feature of the present era. Patterns in migration at both a local and regional scale are also analysed.

Global Systems and Global Governance - This topic’s focus is on the process and impacts of globalisation - the economic, political and social changes associated with technological and other driving forces which have been a key feature of the global economy and society in recent decades.

Assessment 

Component 1 - Physical Geography - 2hrs 30 minutes, 40% of A-Level.

Section A: Water and Carbon Cycles.

Section B: Glacial Systems and Landscapes

Section C: Hazards

Component 2 - Human Geography - 2hr 30 minutes, 40% of A-Level.

Section A: Global Systems and Global Governance

Section B: Changing Places

Section C: Population 

Component 3 - Individual investigation, 20% of A-level.

 

Course Requirements

It is important that students have enquiring minds and an interest in contemporary global issues. Students should want to know why events occur and why places are unique.  An ability to see interrelationships between physical and human processes and that this is creating a very dynamic and unpredictable future. Good overall achievement at GCSE. Good organisation, motivation, critical thinking.

Please note that there is a requirement for 4 days of fieldwork to be completed throughout the course which may require parental contributions for transport. We will keep the costs as low as possible and deliver tuition ourselves.

Teaching Methods

A wide range of methods will be used including investigative work, video analysis, discussion, presentation, ICT including GIS mapping and fieldwork.

 

For more information please contact either Cath Thompson or Erica Sayers.