Middle School Geography of the World: Part I Mapping Skills

This multi-day course is designed to help middle schoolers and geography-motivated pre-middle schoolers sharpen their world map skills.  After finishing this course, students will be able to interpret political and physical maps as well as a variety of special purpose maps.     Students will strengthen their understanding of continents, direction, latitude and longitude. They will be able to identify patterns in political borders by continent, compare these to physical features and draw conclusions.  Students can ask geographic questions such as: why do people choose to live where they do; how does the physical environment affect human settlements;  how do people organize themselves in country boundaries.  The goal of this class is to provide students with skills and challenge them to apply these skills to increase their understanding of the world beyond their own experience.  

Week 1:  Map Features - Introduce/Review basic parts of a map, practice evaluating world maps  Independent Project:  Create a map .  NOTE:  A popular class feature, I encourage our students to send school appropriate geography jokes via the Outschool Classroom for teacher review.  If appropriate, we share these in class.
Week 2:  Political vs. Physical Maps - Examine and compare political boundaries to physical boundaries  Independent Project: Plan a trip itinerary
Week 3:  Special Purpose Maps - Introduce and analyze maps that describe human questions such as: population density, climate, literacy , per capita income , or even the location of some of our popular franchises world-wide.  Independent Project: Student chooses a special purpose map and analyzes it, using a set of questions provided.
Week 4:  Latitude and Longitude  - Kahoot Challenge on material covered in this course

With this small class we are able to present concepts and guide students to apply ideas and draw conclusions about what the maps show them.  We love the academic goal of expanding our students' thinking by helping them make comparisons, create questions and evaluate what they learn.  This learning will be a good foundation for understanding future middle school geography classes about world continents, cultures, economics and history.  We encourage students to complete the independent projects assigned.  When possible, students may start their project before the end of class, giving them an opportunity to clarify their ideas and form a good project plan.  We will share these at the beginning of the next class to help the class deepen their understanding and improve long term memory through repetition.  These projects will also provide artifacts suitable for a student's learning portfolio.

Related courses on Outschool, now:
Middle School Geography of the World: Part 1 Mapping Skills (4 sessions)
Middle School Geography of the World: Part 2 Europe Landforms & Culture (4 sessions)
Middle School Geography of the World: Part 3 Russia @ Heart of Eurasia (4 sessions)
Middle School Geography of the World: Part 4-Middle East-Land & Culture Regions  (4 sessions)
Middle School Geography of the World: Part 5 - South Asia Society & Economy (4 sessions)
Middle School Geography of the World: Part 6 - China and South East Asia  (4 sessions)