| Geography Unit Plan |
| Unit Overview |
Stage 1: What do I want the students to know and be able to do? This unit is an introduction to the five themes of geography to students at the 6th grade level. Students will be expected to know and identify examples of the five themes of geography. They will be able to explain what the themes are and will be able to find examples of each one when studying any particular part of the globe. Stage 2: How will I know that they know it? Students will be able to identify the themes in pictures, mount them with labels and present them to the class. Students will be able to use latitude and longitude to find the absolute locations of several places. Students will be able to understand the concept of place by writing a description of a familiar place and having another student read and guess what the description is about. Students will be able to list ways that people affect their environment every day and to list how people affect their environment through seasonal activities and be able to compare them and discuss which are harmful or are helpful. Further discussion will focus on ways people can change their behavior and improve the environment. Students will be able to research the different religious groups listed in the yellow pages by looking up their origins in the encyclopedia and plot them on the world map. Students will answer questions related to why religious groups immigrated to the United States and will list what factors were involved. Students will be introduced to different physical regions on earth and they will be assigned a group and a region for which they will list items necessary to adapt to the environment of the region while answering questions about their region. Stage 3: What will I have to do to get the students to know and to be able to do it? Students will work in groups to find and mount examples of the five themes of geography after watching a teacher prepared power point presentation explaining what the themes are and how they are represented in the city of Chicago. The teacher will provide the National Geographic magazines where examples will be found. Construction paper, scissor, and glue will be provided to complete the task. Students will work individually on their descriptions of their famous place. These will be used to test each other on what they know about some famous places in the world. The class will reconvene to discuss what it is that makes a place distinctive. The teacher will provide each student with a place that they must describe in writing. (30 names of places: e.g. the Taj Mahal, the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty, Big Ben, the Lincoln Memorial, Mt. Fuji, The Sidney Opera House, the Grand Canyon, Victoria Falls, etc..) Students will list the ways people affect the environment every day. Then they will list how they affect the environment seasonally. The teacher will provide a Venn diagram where the studentsin their groups will write some comparisons and differences between the two lists while discussing what they believe to be harmful or more helpful to the environment. A class discussion of the results will come up with ways that people can change their behavior and improve the environment. For this activity, students will be in their groups where they will use yellow pages provided by the teacher. They will construct a list of religious groups found in the phone book. The students will each take a group to look up and find out where the religion originated. These locations ar to be plotted on a world map. They will look into why these groups immigrated to the U.S. and what political, historical, or cultural factors contributed to their move. For the activity on regions students will be introduced to the different types of physical regions on earth. In their groups students will be assigned a region. The group will develop a list of the items necessary to adapt to the environment while visiting the region. The teacher will provide a worksheet with questions that the group must address. Answers may be found in books that are part of the classroom library and on the internet. Each group will provide their region's information to the other groups. Students will take notes on the regions for which they are not responsible. Notes will be handed in at the end of class. The last activity is another power point presented by the teacher which will address all of the themes and during which students must use as a review before taking a test on this unit. Questions will be presented with some visual cues so that students may put the appropriate information on the review sheet. |
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