Where Are You?

So in curriculum, my professor modeled a very awesome lesson for us today about latitude!

Before we went outside, she passed out two note cards randomly to each student with the vocabulary and their degrees latitude on a separate card:

North/South Pole
Arctic Circle /Antarctic Circle
Equator
Tropic of Cancer/Capricorn
Southern/Northern Hemisphere

Outside, in chalk, she drew an "earth" with the mentioned above words but unlabeled of course.  She placed a student at the North Pole with a scarf on and another student at the South Pole with ear muffs on indicating cold.  At the equator she had a student on each side sitting on beach chairs with sunglasses and hats indicating lots of sun.  That  was really cool because it was such a great visual!

Then, she placed a boat in the middle of the ocean and said it was lost.  How were we to find it?  This is where the importance of latitude and longitude came in!  That day we only focused on latitude but you can introduce longitude and its importance or save it for the next day.  This was a really great way to relate to students because at some point, they have probably got lost somewhere before.

After everything was in place, we started putting our note cards on the corresponding lines on latitude.  While we're doing this, we had a worksheet with a circle on it to place what we had on our "earth" already.  Having a sheet to fill out as we go makes it less possible for students to stop paying attention once they were done placing the cards they had in their hands.

It was so hands-on and even though I obviously knew all these concepts, I think from a child's point of view, I would've remembered it a lot better than just sitting in class and doing a worksheet!