Social Studies Summer Series Day 1: How to Teach Geography Skills

Are you gearing up for the new school year and looking for a way to make those first weeks extra special? I've got the thing just for you, the back to school social studies getting to know you worksheets. Imagine 20 activities that not only introduce your students to geography and history, but also help build a strong classroom community from day one. These activities are perfect for the first week or even the first month of school. Here's what you'll get. Activities like my classmate Bingo, my place in the world and my personal flag. Opportunities for students to share about themselves with my favorite things, my travel passport and more, and creative ways to connect like classroom interview, class constitution and a back to school graffiti wall. But that's not all. I've also included both printable PDF and digital Google Drive versions, which makes it easy to use whether you're in person or preferring some other modality. And I've also added a quick guide with tips and suggestions for each activity, so you're not left wondering what and how to implement these activities. So why not start the year off right? Reduce the stress of planning and making learning exciting with the back to school social studies getting to know you activities. Grab your set today and get ready to see your students light up with enthusiasm. You can find the link in the description and my name is the Southern Teach. 7th grade Texas history teachers. If planning feels overwhelming or your lessons feel scattered, this one's for you. The 7th grade Texas history guided curriculum was created to give you a clear, consistent way to teach Texas history without starting from scratch each week. Lessons are organized, student friendly and built to help you move through content with confidence while saving serious planning time. This is a growing bundle with eight total units releasing throughout the year. Right now the entire bundle is 50% off, which is the lowest price it will ever be. As new units are added, the price will increase. But if you purchase now, you'll receive all future units at no additional cost. You can also purchase individual units and sections if that works better for your classroom. If you want to done for you, Texas history curriculum that grows with you and takes the stress out of planning, check the show notes to learn more. The link is in the description and my name is the Southern Teach. This is the Social Studies Teacher Podcast, a show for busy elementary teachers looking for fun and engaging ways to easily add social studies into their classroom schedule without feeling overwhelmed or pressed for time. I'm Kirsten of the Southern Teach, an educator and mom who is passionate about all things social studies. I love sharing ideas and strategies that are in low-prop and easy to implement. So let's dive in together. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Social Studies Teacher Podcast. This is the first of a brand new five-part series that we're going to be chatting about. And it's called the SS Summer Series, so we're going to be thinking about how to teach a variety of social studies skills throughout the month. That is our focus. This week's topic is all about geography skills. So I'm going to just share with you some tips on how to make geography fun and understandable for students in upper elementary as well as some activity ideas. Geography isn't just about map skills. It's about understanding how our world works and how people fit in it. Teaching geography to third, fourth, and fifth graders means laying the groundwork and foundation for a deeper understanding of how everything is connected. So today, let's go ahead and dive in to some simple ways to make geography fun and understandable for students. The first tip is to start with the basics. Start by introducing basic geography concepts like what is a map? What is the continent? Oceans, directions, cities, states, use maps and globes to help students visualize these ideas and get hands-on with exploring. An idea I have for this tip is to have students create their own maps of imaginary continents, including features like mountains, rivers, and cities. This activity idea actually goes really well with a project I do have called Creative Country and they can make up their own identity for their own continent and not just a continent, but a country and they can put in a government and the history of that country. So it's basically a Creative Country project. It's really fun. I've had a lot of great feedback from my own personal students have utilized it as well as teachers. The second tip is to make it relevant. Connect geography to students' lives by talking about local geography, local landmarks, and what makes their community unique. Help them see how geography can affect their daily lives. So what you could do is do a walking tour of your local school or local area around the school parks that you might have near the school and you can note important landmarks and geographical features along the way. You can also make this a field trip and find maybe at the park or just some local landmark that you might have that has an important history or meaning. The third tip is to learn about different cultures. Introduce students to cultures from around the world. Use stories, videos, and even guest speakers to show them how diverse our world really is. You can host a cultural fair where students research and present information about different countries including their geography, customs, and traditions. This is something that I actually did myself as a ninth grade student. This was in high school in our Geography course, our Geography class. We talked about a different region. I think it was like North America. And then after this big unit about North America, we would have this cultural fair or like this fair where we got to bring in recipes and food and posters and all this stuff related to different countries in North America. And I think it also encompass Central America because I think, I mean, there's only three countries in North America. So I think there was a little bit more. But the whole idea was that as we talked about different regions around the world, we at the end of that unit had a culminating cultural fair where we got to bring in different. We got to showcase our learning about different recipes and all of that. And of course, my go to was making a dish from that specific region of the world. That was my favorite thing to do. The fourth tip I have is to use technology. Bring technology to life with digital tools like interactive maps. I mean, Google Maps is our friend here. Virtual tours, if you want to do that, these could make learning more fun and engaging for students. So one really cool thing to do is to use Google Earth to explore famous landmarks and geographical features from around the world, allowing your students to take virtual field trips without ever leaving the classroom. And you can even make it fun by starting off by finding your school, seeing how your school looks like from Google Earth. You can just type in the address of your school, have them type in their home, then move on to other fun local places that they might like to frequent or maybe a state landmark, locally and mark, and then kind of broadening out to our actual world like different places like the Eiffel Tower or the Pyramid of Giza or finding the Great Wall of China, finding fun and very commonly known landmarks and features around the world. All right. Tip number five is to encourage questions, foster curiosity by encouraging students to ask questions and explore topics on their own. Let them take charge of their learning and discover new things. Have a geography wonder activity where students can ask questions about anything related to geography and you could do this as a class or just do it in groups and then research and discuss the answers together. That could be really fun to do. Tip number six, connect with other subjects. We all know of course social studies is really hard to find the time to teach unless you're specifically a social studies teacher, which most of us more times in upper elementary are not just teaching social studies, we're teaching another subject. So you can show students how geography ties into other subjects such as history, science and math. So thinking about population of different countries comparing contrasting numbers, that's something that is definitely important. We got to know out of a list of countries with populations, which one has the highest population, which one has the lowest population and even going into like comparing numbers up to maybe six digits or seven digits. That's always important depending on which grade level you're in and your math standards for that specific grade level. Just making sure that they are, you know, utilizing math concepts and And tying it in with something. That's always great. You could even do it over time with that history aspect of what was a population of your city or community in 1800 and then what about 18 20 18 40 18 60 trying to find the population of your community or if possible a popular city like New York City or Los Angeles and how it changed over time. How did the population change over time? All right, tip number seven is to practice map skills teach students how to read maps effectively. This is very important. Show them how to use symbols, legend, scales, give them plenty of practice with map based activities. So an activity idea I have here for you is to create a scavenger hunt where students can use a map to navigate their way around the school or local area. And they are locating specific landmarks or points of interest is a great beginning of the school activity, especially maybe just kind of for fun is like either they create their own maps of their school or you can have them go on some type of scavenger hunt where they're finding certain even making clues to find certain objects around the school and giving them hints of okay well like I'm sure by this time if they're at the school for a while if they're a third or fourth of fifth grade they're going to know where the library is or the cafeteria is and you can kind of create clues to point to those specific well known spaces. So the last tip I have is to understand the world help students develop a sense of global citizenship by discussing current events and world cultures encourage them to think about their place in the world and how they can make a difference. So I know in upper elementary common topics related to understanding the world is how people humans adapt and modify the physical environment thinking about land forms and climate and natural hazards all that good stuff natural resources those are the main characteristics of physical environment. And humans in general are always over time over thousands of years have either adapted to their physical environment wherever they are in the world or they have modified physical environment and this is caused positive consequences to the geography of the land or negative consequences. So just kind of thinking about maybe holding some type of discussion or debate on a current global issue such as climate change or maybe people moving to another country some type of migration or people are leaving a certain area for reasons related to geography maybe it has to do with the climate. And maybe there aren't enough resources or maybe there's a lot of hurricanes and so people are leaving so kind of think about how and you can even do this you know maybe currently what's happening currently or what has happened in the past either in their state their local community or in the country or somewhere in another spot in the world. But this is a great way to allow students to consider different perspectives and even think about solutions like what could they have done rather than what they did what could we have done to prevent erosion or what could we have done to prevent you know the inability to grow trees or you know all that good stuff. So there's a lot of great conversations that can be taken place just by thinking of different examples in case studies around the world and as close to home as you want. So to sum up this episode teaching geography to third fourth and fifth graders can actually be exciting and rewarding by keeping it simple making it relevant and encouraging exploration you can help students develop a deeper understanding of the world and their place in it with a little creativity and enthusiasm geography can become a favorite for upper elementary students to help support you with this in addition to this. Hopefully informative episode I do want to share with you a resource I have related to geography and those are my geography daily passages this is something I created a couple years ago I believe I when I first published it was in 2022 there's a variety of topics related to geography. And I think it's really valuable especially if you don't have a lot of time to teach social studies in general or you're trying to like find simple ways to put in social studies and maybe you might have some type of curriculum or you might be utilizing my guided curriculum. But you also want something to kind of reinforce reading comprehension and just kind of just start the day like a warm up for the day so that's kind of where my smart and simple social studies daily review comes in. It includes for geography 12 topics for 12 weeks 48 passages 12 quizzes for each topic and there's also a unit pacing guide included so there's a lot of really great stuff there's a glossary for kivocabulary words and the topics range from map skills to regions of the US to. Cities of Texas comparing regions effects of natural hazards adapting and modifying the environment so there's a lot of great topics there and I will link this listing that I have for you just so you can get an idea of what is exactly included this pairs well with my smart and simple social studies guided curriculum whether you're doing third fourth and fifth grade this is meant to be for multiple grade levels. So really even if you're not in Texas this could be valuable for you so that is something that I'm going to link in the description in the show notes so you can take a look at it for further references. Alright so next week in the summer series we're going to talk about one of my favorite domains and that is history so I will talk to you again next week I hope you have a wonderful rest of your week. Thanks for listening to the social studies teacher podcast if you enjoyed listening to this episode hit that subscribe button and leave a review I would love to hear your thoughts. You can also find me on Instagram at the Southern Teach. I can't wait for you to join me in the next episode for more teacher tips and strategies. Wouldn't it be great if there was an engaging and interactive way to teach social studies topics without all the extra planning prep or hassle. It's no surprise that social studies is usually the first subject to be put on the back burner but that does not have to be the case. I'd love to share with you a free sample from my upcoming social studies membership on five important topics within five domains geography history culture and society government and civics and economics. These notes are perfect for grades three through five students just print and go you can use this sample any way you want including but not limited to reference guide for social studies notebooks class anchor chart bulletin board display a study guide for a test and so much more. In my nine years of teaching my students have thrived in social studies with guided notes it's something I have personally tried and tested in my own classroom with amazing results click on the link in the description or go to the Southern teach calm forward slash social studies to get a sample of the guided notes now. Texas teachers I have a free resource for you if you teach social studies and want to see what my guided lessons are like you can grab a free guided lesson sample for your grade level. Each sample is ready to use and includes the teacher guide lesson slide show digital version guided notes practice activity exit ticket and answer key so you can download it and teach without extra prep. There are free samples available for third grade communities fourth grade Texas history fifth grade US history sixth grade world cultures and seventh grade Texas history you'll also get more information about the full 36 week program including the curriculum map and scope and sequence. It's 100% teaks aligned completely free and made to help you teach social studies with less stress head to the link in the show notes to download your free guided lesson sampler and choose your grade level you could also head to the Southern teach calm forward slash lessons.