Dr. Susie Nyman from the Sixth Form College in Farnborough has developed a creative method using paper chains to help students link ideas and concepts across different subjects. As the Curriculum Manager for Health and Social Care with 24 years of teaching experience, Dr. Nyman’s approach makes learning more interactive and memorable. Below is a transcript of Dr. Nyman’s explanation.
Dr. Susie Nyman from the Sixth Form College in Farnborough serves as the Curriculum Manager for Health and Social Care. With 24 years of teaching experience at the Sixth Form College, she shared an innovative teaching method:
“Paper chains are really, really brilliant for linking ideas. I originally used them when working with a boy teaching A-level English, and we were talking about characters from The Tempest. We linked all the characters together, and it was a really, really good idea. You could also link, for example, stages of a river forming an oxbow lake. You could use them for that. Or you could also use them in history, for example, the Battle of Hastings, showing how the events within the Battle of Hastings are all linked together.
Today, I’m going to link the paper chains with lolly sticks, and for this, I’m going to use organic chemistry. So here, the first compound in the alkanes is methane, so M-E-T-H-A-N-E. That’s one carbon. Two carbons is ethane, E-T-H-A-N-E. Three carbons is propane, P-R-O-P-A-N-E. Four carbons is butane, B-U-T-A-N-E. Five carbons is pentane, P-E-N-T-A-N-E, and six carbons is hexane, H-E-X-A-N-E. This is a really useful idea because it checks the spelling of the students, helps them understand what alkanes are, and then they can link them together and work out how long those chains are.
So here’s methane, which is one chain. Here’s ethane, made of two. Here’s propane, made of three. Here’s butane, which is four. Pentane is five, and hexane is six. So here we have methane, ethane, propane, butane, pentane, and hexane.”
