Geography, Day 5 - Class Recap

Today's map quiz was on Oceania. I told the class that I once visited Kiribati (pronounced Kire-eh-bahs) for a couple of hours in 2014. That was on purpose on a layover from Fiji from Hawaii! One of my very favorite passport stamps!

Hello everyone,

I had a lot of fun with today's class, and I hope you did, too! Thank you for all of your support this week, as it was a difficult one personally with remembering my dad, and also a really great one here at Westview. Here's what happened today:

Learning Targets:
Knowledge LT 7: I can demonstrate an understanding of the characteristics of locations and regions.
Knowledge LT 10: I can demonstrate an understanding of the connection between physical and human systems.

Soundtrack: "Back in Black" by AC/DC. Selected for today because AC/DC is from Australia, which the map quiz was on today! Lyrics here.

AGENDA 9/22/17:
News Brief – Michael
Oceania Map Quiz
Island Mountains
Atlas/Map Work

Homework: Read the blog. Finish North America map (colored and labeled) for the quiz next class. Next news brief: Ellie.

News Brief: Michael had the news brief today and selected this story to talk about: CNN.com - Mexico had two major earthquakes this month. Here's why. We discussed this ongoing story for a bit and found Mexico in the world map packet to note we had done a news brief on it. Thanks, Michael! Ellie was selected to be the next person up.

We also checked in about the upcoming weekend because it was Friday. Yay! :-)

Finally, we watched BBC World News for the day, before moving on.

Oceania Map Quiz: The next map quiz out of the six! Remember that your top four scores will be turned in for your grade for the geography targets. We corrected the quiz in class and I gave students back the South America quiz results.

Island Mountains: I loved doing this activity with my classes! I was taught how to do this lesson years ago when I was getting my Masters at Lewis and Clark. It was so cool to see all of the different islands that students created! The directions for this activity were:

Crumple up a white piece of paper.

Wrap a writing utensil around the middle, so there is a bump in the paper.

Lay it down on a blue piece of paper. Cut off the corners, so that the bottom is circular/curved.

Tape the sides down.

Start coloring the mountain with:
Forests (a ring of green around the middle)
Rivers (blue streams down the sides of the mountain)
Cliffs and rocks (brown or grey)
Lava (red, if you want),
Beaches (yellow/orange).
The only part to your island that could be majority white is the top (snow).

Draw some houses on the flat parts to your island, next to the rivers that would provide water. Where would ships go? Draw a harbor there.

Identify where humans and the environment (Knowledge Target 10 shout out!) would be interacting on your island. Give your island a name and write it on the blue of the ocean!

Make a key for your map – how big is each inch? A mile? Draw a compass (North, South, East, West) for your map!

Here's one resulting map, which was super awesome:

Woo hoo! I hope you enjoyed this activity (really focusing on the behavior target of self-directing learning), but also about Oceania/islands and human/environment interaction!

Atlas/Map Work: The last part of class was dedicated to labeling and coloring the North America/Caribbean section of the map packet, in order to be able to use it on the upcoming quiz next class. For checking the blog, here's a question from the quiz: This country, the furthest east of all the Lesser Antilles in the Caribbean, is east of St. Lucia.. If you are missing your map packet and know you need to have it done, please print out another and have it ready to go for next class:

Google Drive - World Maps Packet

Also, here's the Five Themes of Geography Atlas activity to continue working on (which mostly has to be in class with the atlases here):

Google Drive - Five Themes of Geography Atlas Packet

We did not have a ton of time in class to work on this, due to the fun mountain making activity, So, I took a picture of the North America/Caribbean section (remember that these are two different map pages in your map packet) to help with labeling and coloring at home for the next quiz:

If you click on it, the image should get much bigger.

Have a great weekend, everyone! I appreciate all of your hard work so far in class.