I have Mr Will, my Seventh Grade Geography Teacher to thank for my love of Geography. While I might not be the best at it, I do love learning about how facinating it can be. I suspect he has passed on, but if I did see him again, I would thank him.
Hence tonight’s Tiger Den meeting on the Geography beltloop session. While I knew that I was not going to get them to be experts, it was my goal to show them oceans, different nations, latitude, longitude, North and South Hemispheres. The basics.
I teased them by showing them the beltloops saying that if they did the work they could get them that night. This is after I started showing them all different types of maps. I printed off a camping map of sites at a local state park, a map of the school area via Google and a nautical map. I even had a topgraphical one of the Pacific Coast Trail.
One of the Tigers brought a map that his day printed off of where he skied at Whistler in Canada. Apparently you can strap a GPS to you, ski all day and you find where you skied, how much vertical feel you went down and miles. He had 21, 444 vertical feet and 19.90 miles skied. Totally amazing.
Point being, is that these boys now have a grasp on geography, what the world looks like, what their neighborhood looks like and they are thinking larger than they were. They had fun and got a beltloop! I really liked the worksheets from the link above. It really helped out. I did tell the boys if they bring back the handouts completed for the pin, I would get it for them.
