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Your students can use geography class as home base as they
explore the world around them. One of the best ways to learn
about new places is to make them real for yourself - either by
researching them, visiting them or making personal contact with
someone who lives there.
Here are several activities that your students can do to learn
about a city, town, region or country. Then, they can write stories
and share what they've learned with a broader audience.
- Travelogue: Encourages your students to write a travel story
that profiles a city, province, town, region or country that
they have visited or lived in. Find out about the climate, the
geology, the vegetation, the population, the waterways and the
history of the settlement in the area. Then, they can give their
readers a guided tour of the area through their story. Some key
elements of the travel story include an exploration of the senses
- sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch as well as interviews
with people who know the terrain well.
- Long-distance pen pals: Students can correspond via e-mail
with young people from another city, province or country and
learn about another place through the eyes and ears of a resident.
Through e-mail, the students can talk to their correspondents
about a geographical issue in the news. They can present the
details they learned from their interview in a question-and-answer
format or in a story.
- Language of the land: As experienced travellers know, a voyage
can offer you a chance to hear people communicate in many different
ways. For example, you can travel around a region or a country
and hear the same language spoken in many different ways -- with
different accents and dialects. Meanwhile, some areas can be
home to various different languages because of the patterns of
settlement in that region. How does geography affect the way
people speak? Are people in an isolated place likely to speak
differently than people in the nearest community?
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