igcse

First day of IGCSE !
On Friday the 19th of October Wessex Home Education Group Gathered inside at UWNR warmed by the wood-burner to start our work on an Environmental Management IGCSE.

We had all purchased a coursebook and had briefed ourselves on chapter one : Rocks and Minerals And Their Exploitation .

Johnathan had prepared a power point and fond some news articles for us to look at .

We learned about :

The characteristics of different rocks , the rock cycle, and how rocks are formed.

Surface and subsurface mining .

The reasons for extracting rocks and minerals.

The impacts of mining .

Methods of landscape restoration.

How rocks and minerals can be used sustainably.

We then went out around the reserve and collected rock samples and discovered that the reserve is mainly made of metamorphic rocks

We will be continuing these sessions every few weeks over the winter until we have finished all Nine sections.

This will help towards completing our John Muir Award

IGCSE chapter two …
We returned to the reserve last Friday to continue with our environmental management IGCSE.

The chapter that we looked at this week was all about Energy and the environment. We had all read through the chapter beforehand and, similar to last month, Jonathan took us through what we needed to know .

We learned about :

the names of fossil fuels and how they are formed

renewable and non-renewable energy sources

about how different energy sources are use to make electricity

the environmental , economic and social consequences of different energy sources

different demands for energy

how energy sources can be managed efficiently

current research into possible new energy sources

the impact of oil pollution

how the impacts of oil spills can be minimised

But this week we also did two experiments to go with the topic .

the first experiment was all about seeing the benefits of insulation , we had three jars , the first was just a normal glass , the second had a piece of paper wrapped around it and the third was wrapped in a sock .

We filled them with boiling water and took the temperature every five minuets for an hour.

The second experiment was all about cleaning up an oil spillage , we poured a couple of table spoons of vegetable oil in a tub of water and tried many different methods used to clean up a real spillage, all in all , none of them were successful.