Thursday, September 29, 2016

Geography, Day 7 - Class Recap


Today's map quiz was on Europe. In 2013, I took a two month trip to Europe and traveled by plane, train, and bus all around. Here's a collage of photos from each stop of the trip.

Hi everyone,

We are getting close to the end of the Geography unit! Thank you for your patience and understanding that geography is really important! Here's what happened today:

Learning Targets:
Behavior LT 2: I can self-direct my learning.
Knowledge LT 6: I can demonstrate an understanding of the characteristics of locations and regions.
Knowledge LT 7: I can demonstrate the ability to use geographic tools.

Soundtrack: "Trans Europe Express" by Kraftwerk. Selected for today because it was the Europe quiz in class, naturally. Lyrics here.

AGENDA 9/29/16:
News Brief – Ryan
Europe Map Quiz
Geographic Literacy
Atlas/Map Work

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

News Brief: Ryan had the news brief today, but was absent from class, so I filled in and selected this story to talk about: CNN.com - Two bomb attacks take place in Dresden, Germany. We found Germany in our world map packet (helpfully in the same continent we were taking the map quiz on) and talked about the pushback to refugees across Europe. Roddy was drawn as the next person up.

We also watched the one minute BBC World News update. Here's the link to see the latest one minute update, at any time of day (it will probably be different from what we watched in class):


I asked about the weekend and if anyone had any plans, before moving on.

Europe Map Quiz: The fourth 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 (making sure to note the updated answers from the map quiz key) and then students passed them back to each other.

Geographic Literacy: I know that class has been a little repetitive lately, with quizzes and work time, I wanted to show again why it is important that we are learning about geography. So, I played this clip:


Yikes, to say the least! "Name a country in South America." "Uh... Africa?"

The problem is that this is not uncommon. To back up my point that we really need to know our geography as a society, I showed this article about the results of a 2006 National Geographic study:


Some of the statistics on there (granted, almost a decade old, but I would be willing to bet the numbers have not changed that much) are really frightening, about how little Americans the age of the students in our class know about geography. Less than 20% of young Americans even OWN a world map, which is a reason why I really care that you do! With that in mind, we moved on to continuing to label and prepare for the next map quiz.

Finally, we watched this clip of John Oliver making fun of people for not knowing their geography:



Pretty funny, and it also reinforces the point about needing to know where places are!

Atlas/Map Work: The last part of class was dedicated to labeling and coloring the Africa 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 mountainous central African country is located between Uganda and Burundi. 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):

Have a great weekend, everyone! See you next week. :-)

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