Building Geographic Understanding with Elementary Students

February 20, 2008

“Analytical Overview of”

Building Geographic Understanding with Elementary Students

By Andrea Schoemaker

 

Gwendolyn Thompson’s article recounts her experience with her third grade class over the course of one school year.  She realized they had difficulty grasping the abstract concept about the actual size and shape of the world.  The students appeared to have no idea where continents and oceans were located even though they had seen many maps drawn on a flat surface. The idea of building an entire globe within her classroom came to her suddenly at the start of the school year.  With the help of a young geology student attending a local college, she was able to begin with a large beach ball hung from the center of her classroom.  Students took ownership of this globe through suggestions on how to build it from the inside of the earth out.  As she explained the history of the globe and it’s earliest formations, the students reflected that lesson by painting the earth with hot brilliant colors to reflect the heat of the early planet Earth.  As the year progressed,
Ms. Thompson introduced lessons on further formation of the Earth.  At this time students began to paint the globe again.  Scope and scale on a map is a difficult concept for children.  Ms. Thompson began with a fun scavenger hunt-type map on which students mapped the path of a lost ant.  They realized that these early maps must have some sort of key in order for others to understand it.  That led to more sophisticated mapping of locations within their own school.  Once again, Ms. Thompson taught a lesson on the further formation of the Earth, and students began to make suggestions as to how they may depict continents, mountain ranges, and oceans.  The students’ conception of that large globe was further enhanced when Ms. Thompson added latitude and longitude strings.  The children began to have conversations about how large bodies of water actually were on this globe.  When they began to use peanut shells and placed all mountain ranges, glitter where deserts would be, and silver paper as lakes, these conversations became animated.  They truly realized the size and locations of some world landmarks.  Throughout the year, the globe remained in her room and was viewed by many parents and staff members.  Our author reflected that this approach had caused the children to truly internalize this lesson.  Students leaving her classroom in the spring remarked that they never thought of the globe as round and would always recall this project. 

Making a large globe and hanging it in the midst of a classroom is an ingenious idea.  Ms. Thompson makes a convincing case that children truly learn when it is totally interactive with their lives.  From the painting of bright colors to represent the early formation of the Earth to the extensive time spent painting the oceans, students really understood the vastness of such locations.  The ownership they showed by suggesting peanut shells for mountains and glitter for deserts made it truly their globe.  Scale and symbols on maps are difficult concepts for 8 year olds to understand and yet they began to create maps and create keys for those maps.  The latitude and longitude strings, although simple in concept, allowed students to place continents accurately where they really exist.  Her discovery method was very rewarding as she watched her students transfer that information from continent to continent.  Those students are obviously able to conceptualize any map presented to them in the future. 

I think this project would be very fun to try.  By being able to create their own globe, these students made a personal connection to their learning experience.  Using this method, it makes it collaborative, inventive, and interactive, which best educational practices are encouraging.  I would love to visit Ms. Thompson’s classroom and see what else she has created since this article with her discovery method since the article’s publication in 1999!  I can envision rivers being depicted by tin foil or snow with cotton balls placed on top of the peanut shells.  If Ms. Thompson was a colleague of mine, I would love to collaborate on science projects with her.  Many elementary students feel that teachers do not spend much time on science projects as they are time consuming and require much preparation.  Ms. Thompson appears to be a teacher who would have no problem creating a small mess in her classroom to make a big impact with her students.  I wonder whether these class created globes exist today or whether she has allowed students to take them out of the classroom.  It appears that Ms. Thompson did not create a pen and paper test to assess this project, and yet I wonder how she graded individual efforts within this class.  I do think the globe creation added tremendous relevance to what might have been a mundane study of flat maps on the wall of a classroom.