Stuart-Hobson Students Make a Virtual Visit to Africa Before Taking a Geoplunge in America
November 17, 2010
Stuart-Hobson Middle School | Photo by Fred Lewis
Stuart-Hobson Middle School | Photo by Fred Lewis
Stuart-Hobson Middle School | Photo by Fred Lewis
Have you ever walked the coast of Africa? Sixth graders at Stuart-Hobson Middle School have. They also took a dive in the Mediterranean, occupied pirate-infested waters off the coast of Somalia and guarded precious resources from Algiers to South Africa.
Students traversed the continent Tuesday with teacher Victoria Pearson serving as a guide across a 26-by-35-foot map of Africa provided by National Geographic.
“You can go now and tell people that you walked all over Africa,” said Pearson, as students spread out across the massive map to explore the coastline, mountains, rivers, deserts, rainforests and cities of Africa.
“It’s cool to learn about the different regions, landforms and cultures,” said sixth grader Ben Dewhurst, 11. “I’m used to only the cultures we have here in America, so it’s cool to learn about other cultures and how different the world is from here.”
The colorful map, one of four National Geographic maps that tours local schools, gives students a sense of how large the continent is, delineates its countries, highlights capitals and details land features such as the Sahara, deep forest and savanna. Lesson packets that travel with the map provide fun and engaging ways to explore the diverse continent and its people.
“Really, the whole thing excites me,” said sixth grader James Poindexter, 11. “We’re learning about places and things I didn’t even know about, like there is a huge forest in Congo.”
Cathy Hall of National Geographic said geography is more than capitals, borders and facts; it helps students connect to cultures, current events, languages, religions, economies, resources and even classmates from other countries.
“Geography is culture, geography is everyday – everything they touch and see is part of geography,” Hall said. “So kids need to be aware and in tune.”
Pearson agrees. She gets kids excited about geography through daily discussions of current events. President Obama’s trip to Asia, for example, gave Pearson an opportunity to discuss the countries he visited, as well as the Indonesian volcano that cut short his stay in the island nation where he spent part of his youth.
“You can’t be citizens of this world and not know what’s going on,” Pearson said. “I want my students to be active learners forever. You have to make it fun.”
Stuart-Hobson students will have another chance to showcase their knowledge of geography this week in a fun event sponsored by the D.C. Public School Partnership Project of the Washington Lawyers’ Committee and held in collaboration with Arent Fox LLP.
On Thursday, Pearson will take a team of students to the National Museum of American History to compete in the 6th Annual GeoPlunge Tournament, a daylong event that features rounds of three geography games using GeoPlunge cards filled with information about the 50 United States.
More than 200 fourth-, fifth- and sixth-grade students from 34 DC-area schools will compete in the following games:
- Guess the State: One team tries to guess the state from clues presented by the other team.
- Play the Ranks: Key state rankings of size, population and order of entering the union are used. Teams win points by playing a state card that outranks the opposing team’s state card in the identified key characteristic.
- Race for the Borders: This game is a race between the two competing teams to identify two groups of three states with contiguous borders. The first team to do this shouts “GeoPlunge” and wins that round.
At lunchtime Tuesday, a handful of students gathered in Pearson’s classroom to practice their GeoPlunge skills between classes.
Sixth grader Joyce Thomas, 11, a member of Stuart-Hobson’s GeoPlunge team, will turn their focus from Africa to America at the Thursday tournament. While she loves studying Africa, she’s having a good time learning about geography – no matter what country, continent or culture.
“I like geography because you can really learn about stuff and have it be fun,” she said.
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