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Five Times Five:
Five Activities for Teaching
Geography's Five Themes
Looking for activities to teach the five themes of geography? We've got them for you -- 25 of them! Included: Activities for students at every level!
How many of your students could identify the location of their home country
on a world map? U.S. education officials were shocked when a nine-nation
survey found that one in five young Americans (18- to 24-year-olds) could
not locate the United States on an outline map of the world!
That study represents one of the turning points in geography education
in the United States. Although most U.S. students still don't take a "geography"
course in school -- as students in many other countries do -- increased
emphasis on the development of geography skills is more widespread today
than it was ten years ago. Organizations such as National Geographic and
the National Council for the Social Studies have created materials to
aid teachers in teaching geography skills. And about ten years ago, the
Joint Committee on Geographic Education of the National Council for Geographic
Education and the American Association of Geographers developed five specific
themes to help focus teacher and student thinking when it comes to geography.
Those five themes follow:
- Location -- Where are things located? A location can be specific (for
example, it can be stated as coordinates of longitude and latitude or
as a distance from another place) or general (it's in the Northeast).
- Place -- What makes a place different from other places? Differences
might be defined in terms of climate, physical features, or the people
who live there and their traditions.
- Human-environment interaction -- What are the relationships among
people and places? How have people changed the environment to better
suit their needs?
- Movement -- What are the patterns of movement of people, products,
and information? A study of movement includes learning about major modes
of transportation used by people, an area's major exports and imports,
and ways in which people communicate (move ideas).
- Regions -- How can Earth be divided into regions for study? Regions
can be defined by a number of characteristics including area, language,
political divisions, religions, and vegetation (for example, grassland,
marshland, desert, rain forest).
ACTIVITIES FOR TEACHING LOCATION
At the start of the school year. At the start of the school year,
invite students to create from memory an outline map of the world. (As
an alternative, students might draw a map of the United States or of their
state, if those will be the focus of the year's curriculum.) Collect the
maps. At the end of the school year, repeat the activity. Then bring out
the maps that the students created in the first days of school. How have
their maps changed? Are their end-of-year maps a big improvement over
those drawn at the start of the year?
Literature around the world. Invite students to identify on a
world map the locations of some of their favorite books and book characters.
Among the characters that might be included are Paddington Bear (Peru),
Heidi (Switzerland), Ferdinand the Bull (Spain), Strega Nona (Italy),
Red Riding Hood (Germany), Madeline (France), and Ping (China).
Design a country. Challenge students to dream up their own countries
and to create maps of those countries. The maps should show natural (rivers,
mountains) and human-made (highways, major cities) features. Students
should name their countries, decide which products will provide the economic
basis of their countries, etc.
Map puzzles. Collect state and regional maps from around the
United States. Cut selected pieces from those maps. (The size of the "piece"
might vary depending on the grade you teach. In the middle elementary
grades, the pieces might be about 2 inches square.) Students can use place
names, natural features (lakes, rivers), and other clues on the map pieces
to try to figure out which state each map piece is from. Students might
do this activity in small groups. Each group might have copies of the
same five map pieces. Which group can un-puzzle the map pieces first?
Create an atlas. Assign each student the name of a state or a
country. Provide the student with a large sheet of drawing paper. The
student creates a map of the country showing major cities, natural features,
and landmarks. A fact box on each map might provide standard information
about country size, population, etc. Put together all the students' maps
to create a class atlas.
ACTIVITIES FOR TEACHING PLACE
ABC book of your community. Invite students to create an ABC
book to describe the place in which they live. The word used for each
letter might describe a unique physical feature, the weather, or the people
and their traditions. When completed, the book should tell a reader unfamiliar
with your community what life is like there.
So many ways to say "Hello"! Challenge student to discover how
many different ways they can say "hello." Provide one of the many translators
available on the Internet so they can find out! Students will post the
different ways on a world map. Each student might select a different word
or phrase to create a "world word map." (You can find one translator on
iTool's Language Tools Translator.)
Get the dirt! Invite students to write to friends or relatives
in other parts of the country (or the world). Students should ask each
person to send to them a small sample of the soil that is common in their
area. Students can compare the soil samples from around the country and
the globe. What can they tell about a place from its soil?
Create a postage stamp or a postcard. Assign each student the
name of a country (or a state, if states are the focus of your curriculum).
The student must research that country and design a postage stamp to be
used by its citizens. The stamp might have on it a physical feature, person,
or landmark that the country is noted for. Students present their stamps
to the class, explaining why they chose to use the image they used. Older
students might design postcards. On one side, they draw an image representative
of a place. On the other side, they write a message that provides readers
with several clues about the place. Post students' cards on a bulletin
board. Number each card. Give students a week to read all the cards on
their own and to jot down their best guesses as to the place. At the end
of the week, students can turn over the cards to learn the correct answers.
Who correctly guessed the most places?
Weather report. Assign each student the name of a city. (This
might be a city in the United States if that is the focus of your curriculum.
Or select cities from around the world.) On the first school day of each
month, students collect information about the weather in that city. They
can compare from month to month and plot high and low temperatures over
the course of a year. Which city has the warmest year-round weather? the
coolest? Which city has the widest range of temperatures? Which city has
weather most like the weather in your city?
ACTIVITIES FOR TEACHING HUMAN-ENVIRONMENT INTERACTION
The Lorax. Read aloud the book The Lorax (by Dr.
Seuss), a wonderful example of human-environment interaction for all ages.
Talk about the different characters in the book. How do students feel
about each of them? Who does each character symbolize? How is each character
affected by the Once-ler? Who is the Somebody?
Your town's growing population. Collect population statistics
for your town as far back as they are available. Students can create graphs
to show how the town's population has changed over the decades. How has
population change affected the town?
Wants and needs. Invite students to make a list of the things
they would want to have to have a good life. Which of those things do
they really need? How many of those things they really need can be found
in the natural environment? Which things must be made by people?
What if ... Pose these questions to students: What if the yard
outside your house were never touched? What would it look like if you
decided to let it "go natural" (if you didn't mow it, water it, plant
shrubs, rake leaves)? Ask students to discuss and draw pictures to show
how their yards would be different if they let them go natural.
A picture is worth ... Help students collect pictures of your
town over the years. How is the town different in appearance today from
the way it looked many years ago?
ACTIVITIES FOR TEACHING MOVEMENT
The products we use. Where do the products we use originate?
Invite students to collect labels from foods, clothing, toys, and other
products they use. Where do those products come from? What percentage
of those products are made in your state? your country? other continents?
Are we dependent on products from all around the world? Talk about how
products made outside your community might get there.
Commuter graph. Help students create a graph to show how far
their parents travel to work each day. A different bar will represent
people who commute less than 5 miles, 6 to 10 miles, 11 to 20 miles, 21
to 30 miles, and more than 30 miles. Provide a map for students to show
the different places people travel.
Roots. Where did students' families come from? Ask students to
find out about their families' roots. That information might be plotted
on a class chart so students can see the roots they share with others
in the class. In addition, let students tell what they know about when
and why their ancestors came to the United States and how they got here.
Interview community elders. Much can be learned from the elders
in a community. Students might interview older family members and neighbors
about their memories of long ago. Students could ask questions about the
transportation they used, the foods they ate, the clothes they wore, the
schools they went to. How have things changed?
License plates from all around. Challenge students to keep track
of the different license plates they see in the course of a week. (If
possible, you might go to some place where students could observe a wide
range of license plates.) What states do those plates represent? What
might a license plate tell you about a state? For a follow-up writing
activity, students might write letters to the Department of Motor Vehicles
in each state. In their letters, they might ask for information about
the state's license plates.
ACTIVITIES FOR TEACHING REGIONS
Map your school region. Create a map that shows the areas in
which students live. Invite each student to add a pin to the map to indicate
the location of his or her home. What conclusions can students draw from
the map? Do more students live in one "region" of the "school region"
than in others? Why might that be so?
Time zones. While your students are sound asleep tonight, students
in some other parts of the world are sitting at their school desks. Why
is that? Talk with students about time zones. How do time zones affect
students' lives? How do time zones affect them as they fly from place
to place? What time is it right now in other parts of the world? (For
this activity, you might use the Internet resource World
Time Zone Map.)
Bingo. Invite students to create their own bingo cards. They
should label each column on the bingo card with a region of the United
States. (Use whichever region arrangement appears in your students' text
or your local curriculum; if there are more than five regions, students
select five regions to use on their cards.) Invite students to draw in
each square in the column the outline of a different state in that region.
The teacher will draw the name of a state from a bag full of paper slips
labeled with each state's name. Who gets bingo first?
Regions in your community. Invite students to look at the neighborhoods
in their community. Talk about why those neighborhoods developed where
they did. Neighborhoods develop for many reasons. They might develop around
factories (jobs) or a church, a hill or a lake. What can you learn about
your community from its neighborhoods? Is there a part of your community
that might be called the shopping region or the factory region or the
farm region? What other regions might be part of your community?
Cultural regions too. Collect stamps from countries all around
the world. You can learn about cultural regions from a country's stamps.
What do some of the stamps tell you about that country's culture?
Article by Gary Hopkins
Education World® Editor in Chief
Copyright © 2009 Education World
Originally published 07/02/2001
Last updated 05/20/2009
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