Author: Betty Turpin

Sense of Place: Geography #3: Travel Guides and Panorama Pops

Lesson Overview:

In this lesson, we move away from atlases and places on the map and focus on creating projects that promote an understanding of special locations.  Using travel guides, country books, and city “Panorama Pops”, students work together to create an accordion-style book that highlights features of a particular region.  This is a creative lesson and will be followed by a travel writing lesson next week.  In the first two lessons of this unit, the children saw images from all around the world.  Now it is time to create something beautiful to showcase their new understandings.

Lesson Plan:

Suggested Grades:

4 and above

Objective:

Working in small groups, students will create an accordion-style book to highlight their understanding of special places in a country or city.  (AASL 2.16:  “Use the writing process, media and visual literacy, and technology skills to create products that express new understandings.”)

Suggested Time:

50-55 minutes

Success Criteria:

Students will work in small groups to create accordion-style books highlighting their understanding of a country or city.

Lesson Outline:

1. Introduction:

Remind the students that in the last two lessons they reviewed atlas skills and then practiced finding landmarks in a world atlas.  Today, explain that they will get to use their creative energy to showcase some of the amazing places they have learned about.

Show the collected travel guides and Ms. McMenemy’s “Panorama Pops” books.  Ask what it is about these books that might make you want to visit those places.  Specifically, ask students what the travel guides and “Panorama Pops” books highlight.   Some ideas might include:

  • Sights and attractions
  • Famous architecture including bridges, fountains, skyscrapers, churches, or monuments
  • Shopping venues
  • Restaurants
  • Hotels
  • Parks
  • Entertainment or leisure venues

2. Main:

Explain that today the students will be working in small groups to create an accordion-style book like Ms. McMenemy’s “Panorama Pops” books.  They will use the blank sheets of paper and collage technique.  Once completed, the individual pieces will be assembled into accordion-style books using duct tape. (See attached photos of completed project.)

Show the children the lesson outline.  Use a timer or hourglass to make sure that you stay on target and can finish in one period.

  • With your group, using the available information resources, choose a country or city to highlight (two minutes).  Example: Dubai, UAE.
  • With your group, decide which student will represent which item/building/feature. Burj Khalifa, the beaches, Burj al Arab, Miracle Gardens, Legoland, etc. (3 minutes)
  • Use the white paper, collage materials, and markers to create one piece that highlights that particular feature.  Example:  One child creates a collage image to represent Dubai’s beaches.  (20 minutes)
  • Glue the collage pieces to the cardboard pieces.  (3 minutes)
  • Using duct tape, tape the cardboard pieces together “accordion style.” (7 minutes)

3. Conclusion:

There won’t be much time left over, but encourage the children to take a look at the other group’s projects.  Take photographs as the children work and certainly take photos of the finished products before they leave the library!  Share on the class Weebly or in a library display.

Resources:
  1. A couple of Sarah McMenemy’s “Panorama Pops” City Guides. Either New York, Paris, Venice, Washington D.C., Berlin, or London.  These are accordion-style, pop-out books that will give the children an idea of what is possible.
  2. A collection of travel guide books or country books, whichever you can easily pull from your collection.
  3. Duct tape or packing tape.
  4. Pieces of thin cardboard a bit larger than the size of paper you’d like your students to use.  I typically use the sides of copy paper boxes.
  5. Blank paper
  6. Colored paper scraps for collage.
  7. Markers, crayons, pencils
  8. Rulers
  9. Miscellaneous crafting objects like buttons, sequins, cotton balls, sandpaper scraps, tissue paper, pipe cleaners, Q-tips, feathers, etc., for use in the collage pieces.
Notes:

At the International School of Stuttgart, we were privileged to host Ms. Sarah McMenemy as our visiting author one year for our Book Week celebrations.  Sarah was a lovely guest and conducted art workshops all week long with our students.  Using torn paper, markers, and quite a bit of imagination, Sarah guided our students through the creation of breathtaking pieces.  I highly recommend her work, not only the “Panorama Pops” series, but also each of the picture books she has illustrated.  They are exquisitely done and tie to many of the most popular PYP units.  If you’d like to visit Sarah’s web site, you can do that here:  http://www.sarahmcmenemy.com/.  Sarah made the accordion-style books with our Grade 5 classes, and it was that week with her that inspired me to incorporate the project into other units of inquiry.  Thank you, Sarah, and thank you to Mr. Whitaker, aka Dangerboy, and the entire ISS Grade 5 team!

If you don’t think that your kids will cooperate well, if you are pressed for time, or if you would simply rather they work independently, ask the kids to work independently and create a piece to represent one landmark or natural feature from their unit of study – perhaps one landmark from the city or country where your school is located.  Then, once everyone has created one piece, you can put them all together to make a class book.  Either way will work.  The important thing is to let the kids express their understanding by creating a piece that is used in a book reminiscent of Ms. McMenemy’s pop-up city books.

Recommended books for this lesson: 

  1. Any of Sarah McMenemy’s “Panorama Pops” books, including Berlin, New York, Paris, Venice, Washington D.C., or London.
  2. A collection of travel guides from your library collection or public library. They are usually available in these series:  Let’s Go, Lonely Planet, Insight Guides, Rough Guides, DK Eyewitness Travel, DK Top 10, Marco Polo, Rick Steves, and Fodor’s.
Key Terms:

Landmarks, Geography, Maps, Pop-Ups, Architecture, Sight-Seeing

My Favorite Place

Our Favorite Places

Completed Accordion Book

Sense of Place: Geography #2: It’s a Beautiful World

Lesson Overview:

This lesson is actually an activity that builds on last week’s work with atlases.  It is designed to give students a sense of wonder about the incredible diversity and beauty found on Earth.  You’ll need one atlas for every two students and one copy of Lonely Planet’s Beautiful World.  Take the children on a round-the-world adventure using their new atlas skills!

Lesson Plan:

Suggested Grades:

4 and above

Objective:

To use atlases to locate famous geographical landmarks.  (AASL 4.1.4, “Seek information for personal learning in a variety of formats and genres.”)

Suggested Time:

40-45 minutes

Success Criteria:

Students will participate in the “It’s a Beautiful World Game.”

Lesson Outline:

1. Introduction:

Remind the children that last week they learned how to use the National Geographic Kids World Atlas.  Ask what they remember from that lesson.  Possible answers might include:  Color coding, organized by continents, lots of pictures, flags and games at the back.  Explain that today they’ll use the atlases to find geographic landmarks.  Most are natural, but a few may be manmade.

Show your library’s copy of Lonely Planet’s Beautiful World.   The kids will probably be excited over the size of the book and the quality of the illustrations.  Tell them that they’ll have a chance to look more carefully at the book at the end of the lesson.

2. Main:

Play the “It’s a Beautiful World” game by showing the illustrations on the page numbers listed below.  For each illustration, have the children try to figure out where the place is and then find that place in their atlases.  Once every team has made a guess, reveal the answer.  If you choose to, give the children instructions on self-scoring.

Places in Europe:

Place Number Page Number Place
1 18 Plitvice Lakes National Park, Croatia
2 26 Waterfall at Myrdalsjokull Glacier, Iceland
3 38 Steller’s sea eagles, Kamchatka, Russia
4 46 Lavender fields, France
5 47 Lake District, Cumbria, England
6 93 Manarola town in Cinque Terre, Liguria, Italy
7 132 Black Forest, Baden-Wuerttemberg, Germany
8 135 Aurora borealis, Kiurna, Sweden
9 180 Triglav National Park, Slovenia
10 186-187 Scotland
11 214 Millau viaduct, Midi-Pyrenees, France

Places Outside Europe:

Place Number Page Number Place
12 240 Bagan temples, Mandalay, Myanamar
13 219 Limestone pinnacles at Wulingyuan, Hunan, China
14 164-165 Victoria Harbour, Hong Kong
15 143 Slot Canyon, Utah, USA
16 117 Churchill, Canada
17 115 Lantern Festival, Chiang Mai, Thailand
18 112 Sardine run, Eastern Cape, South Africa
19 110 Holi festival, India
20 86 King penguins, Antarctica
21 61 Angkor Wat, Cambodia
22 49 Humpback whales, Alaska, USA
23 41 Ubari Sand Sea, Libya
24 16 Blue Mountains Nationl Park, New South Wales, Australia
Resources:
  1. Lonely Planet’s Beautiful World, published by Lonely Planet in 2013.
  2. Atlases, one for every two students, preferably the National Geographic Kids World Atlas.
Notes:

If you’d like, you can turn this into a scored game.  I tend to avoid competitions and scoring, but in some schools the children are used to competitive, scored activities.  If you’d like to do this, let the kids tally one point if they guessed on the right two-page spread in the atlas.  The game is too difficult to ask for the correct country, but the correct region as shown on a two-page spread is reasonable.

In my library, I keep Lonely Planet’s Beautiful World in the reference section.  It can go home over the weekend with a parent, but is not part of weekly circulation.  Coffee table books like this one are so big and heavy that the kids drop them frequently.  And, every drop damages the binding.  So, coffee table books = reference books that need a bit of assistance when traveling.

I wrote this lesson while I was teaching at an international school in Germany.  It was intended for my 4th graders and their teachers (Shout Out to the amazing Mrs. Dektar and Mrs. Kumar!!) and so is Euro-centric.  If your school is somewhere else, choose locations that focus on the places closest to your school.  I like to take roughly half of the locations from the continent on which your kids go to school, and the second half from around the world.

Recommended books for this lesson: 

Lonely Planet’s Beautiful World, published by Lonely Planet in 2013.

Key Terms:

Landmarks, Atlases, Games, Geography, Maps

Reference Materials #4: Atlases #1: Atlases

Lesson Overview:

In this lesson, students learn how to use a children’s world atlas.

Lesson Plan:

Suggested Grades:

3-5

Objectives:

Learn what an atlas is and how to use a world atlas to identify countries, capital cities, and political boundaries.

Suggested Time:

40-50 minutes

Success Criteria:

Each student will successfully use a National Geographic Kids World Atlas to locate continents, countries, capital cities, and political boundaries.  Students will understand that an atlas is a book of maps.

Lesson Outline:

1. Introduction:

Show the students a copy of the National Geographic Kids World Atlas.   It looks like a book, but it is not just any book.  This is a special book!   At first glance, what can we notice about this book?

  • It has a lot of maps
  • It has a lot of pictures
  • It has games and a flag section at the back

The big idea here is that an atlas is a book of maps.

2. Main:

Teach how to use the atlas.  I usually teach about the atlas with a series of exercises and games:

Continent Review:   Ask students to turn to the table of contents, which is found immediately after the title page.  Ask the kids to look at the pictures of the globes above each colored column.  There are seven globes and seven columns.  What do they represent?  (Answer:  Continents).

Review the names of all seven continents together.  Example:  Which continent’s maps start on page 68?  (Answer:  South America.)  Which continent is represented by the color brown?  (Answer:  Africa.)   Which continent is represented by penguins?  (Answer:  Antarctica.)  Be sure that the kids are comfortable with the seven continents before you continue.

I’m Thinking of a Country:   Help the children learn some of the names of countries in our world by asking questions that continue to narrow their choices.

Example:  I’m thinking of a country in Europe.  (Give them a few seconds to find Europe in the Table of Contents).  I’m thinking of a country in Eastern Europe.  (Another pause so that they can find the subsection of Europe labeled “Eastern Europe”.)  I’m thinking of a country that starts with the letter “S”!  What is my country?  (Answer:  Slovakia.)

Once the children figure out which country you are referring to, have them turn to the correct page and find it on the map.  Do this several times until they can navigate the Table of Contents with confidence.

What is the Capital City?  Repeat the “I’m Thinking of a Country” exercise.  However, once children find the country on the map, ask them to locate the capital city.  Every country’s capital city is always marked with a black star in a small circle.  Example:  If the children are looking at Canada on page 61, they need to be able to find the star to determine that the city of Ottawa is Canada’s national capital.  Repeat this exercise several times for several capital cities.

Which Countries Are My Neighbors?  Repeat the “I’m Thinking of a Country” exercise.   However, once the students find the country, have them identify the countries that border the one they just found.  Example: On page 115, students should be able to work out that Turkey’s closest neighboring countries are Syria, Iraq, Armenia, Georgia, and Bulgaria.

Where Are You From?  Ask students to find their home countries and show a neighbor.

How Do You Get from Here to There?  Ask students whether they can figure out which countries they have traveled through or over on one of their trips.  If your students have not crossed national boundaries, have them use a country map within the atlas to show some of their regional travels.  If your students do not have much experience traveling, ask them to point out a country or two that they would like to visit and ask them how they would have to travel to get there.

3. Conclusion:

Pull the kids together for just a moment to go over the basics:  An atlas is a book of maps and atlases can be used for locating countries, cities, and borders.  Thank the students for their work and express your confidence that they will now be able to independently explore the National Geographic Kids World Atlas.

Resources:

A class set of the National Geographic Kids World Atlas. You can substitute another atlas if you prefer, but the lesson is written specifically for the National Geographic Kids World Atlas.

Notes:

I have taught this lesson many times, and each time it is a kid-pleaser.  The children love finding places in the atlas!  They love making their own discoveries.  They will want to keep the atlases, and they will want to take them home that day to show their families.  In one of my schools, kids were so enthusiastic that I used most of our book fair credits to purchase and place copies of the National Geographic Kids World Atlas in each classroom for Grades 3 to 5.  Once they know how to use the atlas, they’ll be off and running with their own inquiries and discoveries.  Teaching the atlas is just one of the reasons that I love working with reference materials in a PYP program.

I do have a strong preference for the National Geographic Kids World Atlas.  I’ve seen other children’s atlases, and none of them compares in quality, vibrancy, or content with the National Geographic.  Plan ahead and be sure to have enough copies of the atlas for this lesson.  I typically keep a class set in the library reference section, then put 5-8 copies in each classroom.  That is a lot of atlases, but students will use them if they have access to them.

Recommended books for this lesson: 

National Geographic Kids World Atlas, Fourth Edition, published by National Geographic.

Key Terms:

Atlases, Maps, Geography, Continents, Capitals, Boundaries, Flags, Landforms

 

Reference Materials #1: Dictionaries and Alphabets #1: Alphabet Games

Lesson Overview:

In this lesson, students practice using the Roman Alphabet in English.  I use this lesson with my Grade 3 students every year.  To do research in Unit of Inquiry books, students need to be able to use an index.  Without an understanding of basic alphabetization, using an index is impossible.  Some of them understand the concept of arranging words in alphabetical order, but for many of them this is new material.  Many students struggle with what to do if the first letter is the same.  Being able to alphabetize is a skill, one that needs a bit of practice!  The students enjoy these games, and I particularly like the collaborative, hands-on approach that these lessons take.  Almost always, when I teach this lesson, teachers document the activity for posting on the class Weebly or digital portfolios.  Get your alphabet cards ready and enjoy these alphabet games!

Lesson Plan:

Suggested Grades:

3-4

Objective:

To practice alphabet skills so that students have a better chance of using and working correctly with dictionaries, indexes, encyclopedias, library spine labels, etc.

Suggested Time:

45-50 minutes

Success Criteria:

Working as a class, students will correctly alphabetize four groups of letters/words.  The four groups begin with very easy material but quickly become more difficult.  Each set of words/letters much be placed in correct alphabetical order.

Lesson Outline:

1. Introduction:

Provocation: Use a set of keys.  Tell the kids that the “key” they will practice today “unlocks” an infinite amount of information.

Begin by singing the “Alphabet Song.”  Ask the kids how the alphabet can be a key?  What could the alphabet unlock?  Ask the class to sing the alphabet song together so that you know that they know the alphabet.  If they can sing the song, they can complete today’s work.

Relevance:  We need the alphabet to work in many of our reference materials.  We must be able to confidently look up words, find books on shelves, and locate articles based on how they are spelled.  Thus, the alphabet is very important!

2. Main:

Four alphabet games:

  1. Letter cards (red)
  2. Words cards in which each first letter is different (yellow)
  3. Word cards in which each first letter is the same, but each second letter is different (green)
  4. Word cards in which each first two letters are the same and the third or fourth letters are different (blue).

See the photos and letter/word lists attached.  I made my own materials for this lesson, but I have provided everything you need to make your own material set.

Students form a giant circle sitting on the floor.  Everyone gets one card per game.   The only two rules are that:

  1. You may not touch anyone’s card but your own.
  2. You may not speak or gesture to another student. Every person must think through the alphabet every time.  If you call out an answer or tell someone else when to put his card down, you’re taking away his/her chance to learn!  Don’t spoil the fun.  Think to yourself and think quietly!!

The person with the first card gets the class started, and the silence cannot be broken until the last card is on the floor.

After each round, let the kids give themselves a round of applause.  Then, clarify any word meanings they do not understand.

3. Conclusion:

We will practice again next time.  Being able to work confidently with the alphabet is an important skill!

Resources:

Alphabet game cards, four sets.  (See photos and attached word/letter lists.)

Notes:

I love using this lesson because it is cooperative and incorporates movement.  Too many alphabet lessons only use a pencil and paper, and this one is simply more fun.

I have never completed the four rounds without a lot of talking/whispering despite all my pleas to the contrary.  Some kids can’t help but shout out or take control by telling others what to do.  I try to remain good natured about this, but if you have someone who is consistently spoiling the game for others, you might have to ask that child to sit out for one round.

Recommended books for this lesson:

None

Key Terms:

Alphabet, Alphabetize, Alphabetization, ABC Order

Word Card Word Lists

Letters (Red)

First Letter Different (Yellow)

Second Letter Different (Green)

Third or Fourth Letter Different (Blue)