What if the students have no idea what a glacier is?

A comment from Phil highlighted this and this is such an important and valid point.

What is the students have no idea what a glacier is? They have never seen one or heard of one and cannot relate to it. The latter point was sometimes my issue with physical geography - I just could not relate to it and it therefore did not interest me and I found it harder to learn about.

Therefore, an initial starting point should be with the idea that students (may) have no idea what a glacier is. At the moment, I am doing my preliminary placement in a primary school with year 5/6's so with them in mind,  here are a few ways glaciers could be introduced:

-Simply pictures of Antarctica etc and getting them to describe what they see. See what words they can come up with. Powerpoints are a good way of doing this
-Finding some video content which is relateable with the age group who are learning about the subject. (There was a TV show from 2005 on the BBC for children called serious Arctic. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1963777/ states if you sign up you can watch the episode where the children visit a glacier. 25 mins log. Also http://musaddiqia.blog.com/2012/06/14/hd-dvd-serious-arctic-online/ Really hope these are not an illegal sites.) Anyway, I vaguely remember watching a similar programme to this when I was younger about the Amazon I think. It's produced by the BBC for CBBC. It takes a bunch of kids to the Arctic and they have to visit areas, do tasks and live out there. All aged 12-14. This one particular episode they visit a glacier and actually get stuck there showing to to be an extreme landscape. Most importantly, it is written by 12-14year old for this age group, sharing their experiences and it teaches children through other children, which hopefully they can relate to. Of course, it would not be the be all and end all of glaciers, but it might be a way to introduce the topic so the studetns can get a rough idea about glaicers and see others there and hear about their perspective. It also allows emersion in the topic without the students fully realise they are learning.


However, after watching the Solo Taxonomy video, it is also important to recognise and establish what students already do know. This could be done prior to them even seeing a picture and just hearing the word.