Geography Pit Stop

This Lesson plan is intended to be a supplemental project to go along with your regular World Geography curriculum. To complete this plan it includes a country report (of their choosing) country survey sheets, cultural projects, and passport. All of the items can be downloaded on this page.

RESOURCES: I do recommend using the following websites to gain current information-to include maps and flags.

www.enchantedlearning.com has the breakdown of countries depending on languages. They are broken into 6 groups: English, French, Spanish, Arabic, German, and Portuguese. This is the breakdown that I use in this project. If you use the link I provided, it will bring you to the world flags page. If you look along the links at the top of the page, you will see that there are “Flags of Arabic Language Countries, Flags of . . . etc. clicking on that will bring up flags of each of the nations that have that specific language as their main language or base language. Have your kids use this to pick the nations they would like to complete their Surveys on. They need 5 of each language. I suggest also including your country as an ADDITIONAL country in your countries language–For us I have it listed as 6 for English speaking countries–1 must be USA.

www.cia.gov (look under LIBRARY) There are two pages that I suggest on here: The World Fact Book page has information on EVERY country from population to literacy rating. This information is current and updated regularly. I HIGHLY recommend using this page to gather most of the information for the Country Survey Sheets. The World Leaders page has the CURRENT complete listing of every office held in the local government for each country. There is a task that this is needed for. It is essential that you have access to this page, unless you decide to not assign this task.

A fairly simple country report information packet. It was created as a summer project for public school. I think for this project it will be a great guide for the report.

http://www.schoolsnet.com/pls/hot_school/sn_primary.page_pls_show_on_iframe?x=16180339&p_href=/img/schoolsnet/primary/resources/geography/downloads/geo_country_info_finding.pdf&p_crumb_seq=6&p_crumb_label=Country%20Project

Project folder Well this project folder is much different than my others, in fact it is so completely different it’s NORMAL! It’s simply a binder. They will need either their geography binder or a 1″ binder for this project. Each kiddo will need to create their own title page and I suggest a Table of Contents. Page protectors would be a nice addition to keep everything nice and neat.

DOWNLOADS:

Check List for Geography Pit Stop: http://www.mediafire.com/?32n9aa432urg4mj
Passports: http://www.mediafire.com/?y4jrj894b23
Country Survey Sheet: http://www.mediafire.com/?v1v4r7q5bmj407k

Mapping Project:

This project was originally found on http://www.4himkids.com/index.html It is a 9 week project that takes maps and page protectors and creates a layered effect. It's broken down so that you work on all sections each week. I didn't exactly like that idea. I wanted to work on each section separately in order. Less confusing for me that way! Since this is all created already in it's back and forth manner, I just created a quick list in .pdf format.

Page Protector lists: http://www.mediafire.com/?5ock93pg42w46zt
Maps & Misc. Pages: http://www.mediafire.com/?8cn5eo7hnlz9w5o
These are not the maps listed on the original project--it is just outline maps
Divider Pages: http://www.mediafire.com/?9io2ev21f9vey4s

BONUS Project: I recommend a BONUS project. One that is fairly simple but may have a HUGE impact upon your kids/students.It is intended to help the kids understand the difference between what is considered 1st world countries and 3rd world. The very basic difference besides facilities is FOOD. The amount that a person eats in a 3rd world country vs. what we eat in say the United States is amazingly vast. Even for just 1 meal. I suggest having each child research this and prepare a meal from a 3rd world country-and one for the United states. If they look at just the caloric intake and prepare the meals based on that average, it will be eye opening.

A couple FYI:

** I created this for my 2 older girls. They are in 5th and 8th grades. The passport has 64 stamp slots available. I came up with the random number of 31 by subtracting 2 from the 64. These are their country reports. then I divided the 62 remaining slots by 2. It just happened to work out perfectly with 5 per language with an added 1 for USA. Each kiddo will have 63 stamps (no need to have USA in their passports twice) because they will create 2 stamps for each country they do their surveys on and their country report.

** My plan is that once they finish their survey sheets, I will copy them and they will put each others in their books. So they will have a total of 62 survey sheets in their folders. Copy the Table of Contents as well so that a second one won’t have to be remade.