The Importance Of Geography Education

In all three of these artifacts, I have developed relevant, integrative, challenging, and exploratory units of study. The “Preserving the Past” unit incorporates all four core subjects as well as a service learning opportunity. My interdisciplinary unit on geography connects Language Arts with Social Studies with visual art mixed in, and the Greek mythology ELA unit was taught in conjunction with a Social Studies class (1). The Civil War unit and NC geography unit I have created incorporate Common Core standards as well as NC Essential standards. Lesson plans and assessments in all of these units were created using backwards design in which I started by looking at the standards and objectives students would be expected to reach and based my assessment based on those objectives (2,10).

The changes are meant to help the student to have a better understanding of the social studies in preparation for middle school. For instance, every grade in elementary level has the Map and Globe skill as the next to the last topic to help the student learn how to use maps to retrieve social studies information. Additionally, the syllabus gives a more detailed approach, which the teacher must address fully. The information processing skills as mentioned earlier is also one of the vital changes (GADOE, 2016).

The Five Themes of Geography are: Location – Absolute points on a map or grid or Relative to where something may be; Place – The physical and/or human characteristics of a locations; Human/Environment Interactions – How humans have impacted the landscape or environment; Relationship between places Movement – How humans interact on the earth (i.e. how they communicate over distance (short or long)) and Regions – a unit of space that has commonalities defined by physical, human and environmental geography. The Explorers of the New World may have not known what the Five Themes of Geography were but they quickly learned. Of the five themes the ones that they all took advantage of was the physical Location and Place as they learned to navigate

Gibbs, G (1988) Learning by Doing, A guide to teaching and learning methods. Cheltenham: The Geography Discipline Network. (GDN).

I believe that being able to implement the geography curriculum appropriately is ideally resulted based on the position the school is in, such as whether the teachers are interested or skilled in the subject, whether student’s strengths and learning are being acknowledged or unnoticed and whether staff members are supported in their learning by provided with appropriate resources or limited resources to share with the students. These points allowed me to again think back to my past and have a better understanding about why I may have lost interest in the subject of geography. I personally feel that once I finish my degree and start teaching, the first few years will be the toughest in that regard as I will lack support for subjects such as HSIE and along with other teachers have to invest more time and effort devising new resources and teaching methods to suit the new curriculum. The time that needs to be invested in making these resources will definitely affect other areas of teaching which can be a daunting

The philosophy of the primary school where I work is that every child's unique needs and abilities should and must be honored. Children's different learning needs and styles are incorporated into the curriculum. On an informal level, teachers are encouraged to make use of lesson plans that utilize different types of media and methods of evaluation. Lesson plans often make use of visual and kinesthetic aspects of the learning experience as well as more traditional methods that emphasize mathematical, spatial, and verbal intelligences.

How is History important to our elementary school system. History is a wonderful lesson for students to learn. My topic is a simple topic.If I could teach elementary students one lesson, I would teach a history lesson on Jamestown. Jamestown: Why was Jamestown built?, Was Jamestown the first settlement of VA?, Who lead the colonist to Jamestown.

In conclusion, the instruction of social studies has continue to take a back burner role in classrooms,because it is not one of the subjects in the high stakes testing covered under the NCLB. However, this can change if teachers employ effective teaching strategies, that will help everyone to realize the importance of social studies content at every grade level. This will ultimately help our students to have the knowledge, and understanding to appreciate our diverse culture.

Introduce a globe. Familiarize learners with the position of the North and South poles. Indicate the location of the Earth’s axis.

With teacher direction, construct responses to compelling questions supported by reasoning and evidence. - SS.5.8. Analyze how rights and laws influence interactions between groups in society. - SS.5.19. Create geographic representations to illustrate how cultural and environmental characteristics of a region impacted a historical event.

In chapter five, we discussed several things on geography such as: ecology, the interaction of geography, demography, and environment. In the textbook they defined ecology as “the science concerned with the interactions between living things and their environment.” Human ecology which “is the part of ecology that deals with the way in which human societies adjusts to their environment. Ecological balance “is the term applied to the state achieved when plant or animal species, with its own characteristics and needs, has adjusted to its environment and survived, and when other species, which have likewise adjusted to the environment, prevent it from expanding indefinitely and from crowding them out. The environment is the sum `of all the external influences that impinge on the human organism. Geography is a social science that focuses on the spatial

Have students share with the class and have students think about the focused inquiry question. Introduce Focused inquiry question “Is life better near the coast, dessert, valley, or mountain region?” Students do not need to answer question but just bring up the question to get them engaged and thinking where would life be better depending on the region.

The articles Kindergarten Geography, Developmentally Appropriate Geography, and Google Earth all discussed effective ways to teach geography to students. The first highlighted more multicultural education, the second aimed at general education, and the last emphasized the use of technology. Obviously, teachers design their lesson plans and implement teaching strategies to satisfy the needs of their audience—the students. Educators need to connect the curriculum with the students’ culture and family, which leads to an increase of knowledge capacity. In the first article, Carlee successively taught a group kindergarten students with an Islamic community by activating background experience with international landmarks and family cultural background.

At the beginning she defines important parts of maps such as the scale, legend and different projections. She discusses how as children develop, their representations change and how different grade levels require different activities. She goes on to provide different activities that pertain to different topics for different grade levels. This already applies to my unit because I planned on having students look at different maps throughout the lessons with an example the Nile River lesson example from assignment 5. One way to further incorporate it could be to have the students analyze a map for homework and answer questions based on the

In order to teach successfully teachers must learn about first learn about their students. Teachers must assess the student’s capabilities and interests. Some students are visual learners, while others learn from hands on activities, or verbal communication. Not all students can learn through memorization, rather they learn through interest and relation to the topic. “To realize what an experience, or empirical situation, means, we have to call to mind the sort of situation that presents itself outside of school" (Democracy and Education). The curriculum should encompass material that is most useful for a student to learn. It seems that in the majority of schools, students are not given the flexibility to guide their own learning, but rather follow rigid instructions that destroy the student’s imagination.