Today's challenge: writing a geography lesson plan.
Geography is my favorite subject that I know the least about. My first degree was in International Political Science, and Social Studies with a History focus. I only got to take one geography course, but it enhanced my interest the international political science. At UMM there was a Human Geography course, my book was by Paul L. Knox and Sallie A. Marston, full of great introductory information but it is not too indepth. It was enough to help me past geocentric concepts and get me here where I am trying to centralize some resources.
Minnesota has well outlined geography standards. Apparently "students will be able to "determine feasible locations for economic activities and examine voting behavior." Easier said than done.
The only recommendation comes from the Minneapolis public schools. Here is an activity where students must find the best home for $250,000 in the city of Minnesapolis by over laying a variety of maps related to crime, property value and proximity to schools. I want modify the lesson to take in more economics and personal finance. Meaning that students would look at rental units rather than houses.
The lesson I'm staking out is based on a unit I did for my human growth and development class at Morris. The original assignment was to create a group website that linked to individual projects. For example my report on Nigeria was on the West Central Africa site that featured all the other students with nation reports in that region. The assignment was finding relevant statistics (UNICEF, WHO and CIA World Factbook) explaining their signifigance to human development, and graphically organizing that information in a HTML format.
Most of my classmates thought that it was an inappropriate assignment for our human growth and development course. Likewise, the human growth and development aspect might be inappropriate for a 10th grade geography course. Working with 10th graders in the year 2010 . . . I'd need confidence in the abilities of my class to make it a HTML assignment but I think it's a great project that diggs into census demographic information and relates it to international institutions.
The Population Reference Bureau offers materials for educators.
Here's a presentation on worldview's changing impact on maps
