"Name, Location, and Climate"

Project Name: “Name, Location, and Climate.” Grade Levels 3-5.

Description of Learning Goals and Standards: Students will learn how to name a country, its location, and climate. They will learn how to use a word and picture bank to complete the activity. These goals are important because the students will gain help in learning different countries. They will learn about their location, climate and the different terms and pictures that can be used to describe them.

QCC: Technology Integration: Basic Skills
5 Topic: Basic Skills
Standard: Operates basic technology tools and applications.

QCC: Social Studies: Geography
18 Topic: Location

Rationale of Technology: This lesson could easily be converted into a standard fill in the blank worksheet. By using the program Inspiration, it allows the students to get more interactive with the lesson and completing the activity. It helps achieve the goal of the overall lesson by allowing the students to visualize the connection of the countries to their location and the climate. Inspiration also allows them to use pictures when showing the relationship between a country’s location and climate. They will learn how to describe answers not just in words but by using visuals as well. The advantages of using this technology would be that it presents what would be a simple lesson in a more interactive fun learning way. One disadvantage of the lesson is that the students would be working independently and some students might not do as well in completing the activity correctly and in a timely matter.

Description of Lesson Implementation: This lesson combines teacher instruction and individual work. Depending on the grade level, it can be modified for younger children by just using teacher instruction and class participation. The teacher would select five countries in different parts of the world. They could be countries that the students have never heard of or have already studied. The teacher would give terms for the students to learn such as, equator, prime meridian, climate, and hemisphere. The teacher will give a lesson about theses different terms for the students to become familiar with. When setting this lesson up, you could go through the Inspiration activity as a class. In order for the students to do it individually, there would have to be a computer available for every student in the class. Seeing as though that may be a problem for most teachers, you could rotate the use of the computers to complete the activity.

Assessment: The actual activity will be an assessment. Teacher observation would also be an assessment. The teacher will observe that the students are correctly typing in the web address for the webpage to access the Inspiration graph. This will assess the QCC standard of basic computer skills. A continued assessment would be a test the students would complete to show what they have learned.

Other Places to Use this Solution: I don’t think that this activity would be good for the students to use at home. If the teacher printed the activity and gave it to the students they could fill it in at home. But doing this would take out the interactive technology of the lesson.

What I learned and what I would improve for next time: I would improve the lesson by presenting the activity first and by having the students fill it out based on prior knowledge. I would teach the lesson to them as planned and have them complete the activity again. The students could then compare their initial responses to their responses after they heard the lesson.

References/Resources Used:
www.socialstudiesforkids.com
www.images.google.com