Students are loving Social Studies!

As a Geography Major myself, I'm thrilled to be teaching this Social Studies unit on Global Interactions. I'm even more excited about the enthusiasm towards this unit exhibited by what seems like the entire class.

After an introduction/brainstorming lesson or two to begin the unit, we looked at how places are described or located around the globe using latitude and longitude coordinates. Many of the students expressed that they had never seen or used an atlas before, and all of them were very focused when completing the activity of locating world cities and identifying their coordinate locations.

We discussed issues and topics about many of the cities from the activity - culture, economy, war, the environment, etc. - which is the focus of this unit.

We moved onto the topic of 'trade' and began with a mismatched puzzle activity. The follow-up discussion of what the students observed and experienced perfectly mirrored what takes place around the world in terms of trade: shortage and/or excess resources, groups unwilling or difficult to trade with, disputes, value placed on different resources, etc. The class really seemed to understand the concepts well.

Continue to discuss world events, news, and issues at home, as the Social Studies curriculum is based on inquiry and discovery. I really look forward to seeing where student interest and questions take this unit!