Curriculum Resource: Dimensions

Dimensions is a great web resource that I've discovered lately.  It is a website developed by the BBS that helps us actually visualize the size of events or sites in recent (the Twin Towers that were destroyed by terrorists), modern (the Gulf Oil Spill or the Exxon Valdez Spill), historic (the blast radius of a World War II bomb), or Ancient (the length of the Great Wall of China or the destructive range of Mount Vesuvius) by superimposing the distance over modern maps.  Even better, it allows you to put your zip code in the epicenter of these events.

This allows you to present the information to your children/students in a way that is extremely personal.  So, for example, when I was teaching about the Civil War, I could tell my students that the average size of a 19th Century slave plantation in Alabama was about 1,000 acres.  But do they know what that means?  I doubt it, since I don't know what that means (I'm not great at distances, so some of them may have been better than I am).  But with this website, I can tell them that the average slave plantation stretched from close to the intersection of High House Road and Chatham Street to Coronado Village off of Walnut Street on one side, and from almost Cary Elementary School to Wake Med Hospital in Cary along the other dimension.  THAT, I think, will mean something to them.

Geography Fair

One of the things that our homeschooling community does each year is sponsor a Geography Fair, in which each participating family puts up a table about a particular country, with a Science Fair-type board, display items, and our favorite item--FOOD!  This is a multi-age thing, rather than just a middle school age thing.  However, it is something that we have done for years, and which I think I still valuable.  It is one of those things that is interesting to do over time, because it does really demonstrate the evolution of our  children over time.

I can't remember all the countries we've done, but I know the last two ones we did--Congo and Chile---were chosen by my son based on animals or environmental factors.  However, this year we did Ethiopia.  My son chose that country because he did a report on Ethiopia for his 19th Century History Coop, and discovered that among all the nations in Africa, Ethiopia was the only one that really was able to remain independent in the 19th Century after the Berlin Conference of 1884, when Europe decided to divide up Africa between them as European colonies (disregarding what the Africans might have thought about the idea, of course).  So I see that as a middle school development--no longer choosing his country on the basis of animals or rain forests, etc., but on the basis of a historical/political fact.

However, it did break the rule I had set after our experience with the Congo, which was NO MORE GEOGRAPHY FAIR PROJECTS FROM AFRICA!  Now, this is not because Africa is not interesting nor valuable, because it is.  But a big component of these displays is food for people to sample, and African food is....well, let's just call it challenging.  (For the Congo, it was not just challenging, it was the pits.   Believe me, we tried, but every Congo recipe we made that didn't have things in it that we were allergic to was pretty much inedible. )

Ethiopian food, however, is quite spicy and enjoyable.  Unfortunately, it is quite hard to fix at home, especially in the South.  The food is made in a barbare sauce, which requires about $50 to buy about 12 spices....which I reduced to $8 and two spices, especially because I didn't want to make it really spicy for all the children who would be attending.  It is served on a large sourdough and spongy flatbread called injera, which is made out of a type of wheat that is only grown in Africa,   So instead, I just used tortillas.

So, really, it wasn't anything like real Ethiopian food.  But I did explain about how the Ethiopians eat without utensils, but just tear off bits of their platter bread (the food is served on top of a piece of injera that can cover the entire table) and scoop up the stew-like food.  Thus, the students got to have an experience of eating kind of like the traditional Ethiopians.

Here is our dish, which is an Anglosized version of Doro Wat:

Of course, much of the evening is spent going to the other tables and learning from the other displays (this year, each child had a "passport" where they wrote done relevent facts and got a stamp to demonstrate that they had visited).  Below is a selection of the wonderful table displays:

It was a really fun and educational night.  We appreciate everyone who put so much time into their displays and their food.

Christmas Blog 2010: Where in the World is Santa?

Google has a couple of neat things to combine geography with the countdown to Christmas.  First, if you go to the Google homepage, it has an international Christmas Doodle that looks like this:

On the actual site, as you scroll over each picture, it enlarges to show you more of an international scene.  Some are actual cities, while others refer to a specific country or region.  There are 16 international pictures (in addition to one undefined Santa by the chimney graphic);  how many can you identify?  List your ideas below, and I'll give the answers in a future blog post.

Then, the US and Canadian air security agency, NORAD, is sponsoring its annual tracking Santa project, where they report where Santa is on his journey delivering presents around the world.  This year, however, it is shown on Google Earth, so you can actually see where he has been and where he is heading.  They also have some short videos of Santa flying over some famous sites across the world, such as Johannesburg, South Africa, Mount Everest, or the Great Wall of China, along with a fact or two about that locale.

So, once again, a chance to squeeze in a little learning in the midst of the Christmas celebration.  That can be important for those of us who homeschool--now, in addition to checking off math (having my son double the cookie dough recipe, which ended up being a refresher in multiplying fractions) and chemistry (for actually baking the cookies), we get to add geography.

Merry Christmas to all my readers around the world--or just generic good wishes if you don't celebrate this holiday.  

Curriculum Resource: American Geography

OK, so maybe this one is a little dubious...but I thought it was fun.

Someone has come up with a map of the United States with each state represented by a TV show.  Alas, as a former DC resident, I have to point out that they did not include the capitol city, although perhaps that was due to the difficulty in choosing just one--what with 24, Bones, Get Smart, Murphy Brown, X-files, Commander in Chief, and West Wing (among others) all in the running.

So your media-fixated child could watch episodes from all these shows and do a report on what s/he found was different between all these states--and what was the same.  Actually, I would LOVE to read a report on something like that.  If anyone ever does anything like that, or hear of anyone who does, PLEASE let me know.

The link to the USA-TV map is: http://www.geekologie.com/image.php?path=/2010/11/12/tv-america-full.jpg