Day 1:
On Day 1, the student’s first activity is to complete a journal entry that serves as a springboard and asks the students to share their families’ places of origin, favorite foods, and one holiday they celebrate. This provides the students with the opportunity to share information about their identity, whether it’s cultural, political, or religious. From this activity, students will be able to establish a diverse list of world locations that is relevant to them and that would serve as the foundation for the following activities.

After the students complete their journal, they engage in a teacher-facilitated class discussion based on their responses. This allows the students to share their identities with their peers. As the students share this information about their cultural identities, I take this opportunity to represent the geographic locale on the map at the front of the class. Thus, the students are able to visualize the geographic representation of the classes’ cultural identity. Using the atlases and maps, I point out the different ways we can identify characteristics of the land, whether it’s a physical feature or a human feature.

The next activity we engage in is the Characterize/Categorize activity that Andy Rothstein from NAF shared with the Curriculum Fellows. Using an atlas as a resource, students work in groups to brainstorm as many things as they can for the word “geography.” Once they brainstorm, they find and list a unifying characteristic for all of their words and group them. So, the students, once they brainstorm, have to identify and then further demonstrate their understanding by categorizing the information. I have the students group the information into two categories: physical geography and cultural geography. This is another step that furthers their understanding of the vocabulary associated with the learning objectives and gives them an opportunity to apply this understanding.