World Geography.

Learn Through English

	Geography
	World Geography

TIPS FOR TEACHERS

With this activity your students are going to learn the geography of the world: continents, countries, rivers, cities, etc. It is based on the EnchantedLearning website, which conveys a lot of other interesting activities in English you might like to use in your classroom, and on the Google Earth program, which allows us to work on line.

The activity comprises several tasks.

TASK 1. For a start, they will have to 'meet the world'. This task is to be done on line because your students will have to get the information they need from a website and then write the answers on a print out. Your students will also need to have the sheets to fill in with the data they get from their sources of information.

For this activity it is necessary to have previously downloaded Google Earth. It’s free!! If you haven’t, you can do it here. This programme offers you a great variety of possibilities. If you are not familiar with it yet, do so now and use it as you think best. You can change the data in the worksheet according to your interests. If students can’t get enough information from websites, which we doubt, provide them with some web addresses like these:

http://www.google.com/Top/Regional/Europe/

http://plasma.nationalgeographic.com/mapmachine/index.html

http://www.cedarville.edu/academics/education/resource/geo/intermain/pbwebsmk.htm

Help them to navigate when necessary and let them find the pages with the information they need.

This is our proposal:

First of all, after they have started the programme, let the students get familiar with the control panel. Show them how to use the mouse… if they haven’t found it yet!!! Tick the navigation panel open and check the different functions included there (terrain, borders, roads, tilt, north, etc.). With their mouse they can manipulate the world to make it turn faster but also they can zoom in and out of places if they rotate the wheel in the mouse. Let them "play with the world” for a few minutes. When you think they are ready, give them an activity sheet and they can start filling in the sheets with the right information.

There is a sheet for each continent that includes two charts. The first one asks students to fill in some data about a few countries in each continent and the second chart tells them to write in the most important data of a country they have chosen.

Europe sheet

Asia sheet

Africa sheet

America sheet

Oceania sheet

You can then organise the activity according to your needs, the number of students in the classroom and the time you think necessary: it can be divided into as many sessions as you like since there are sheets for each continent and for each country your student chooses to work on. Remember that the printouts can be altered to suit your goals, so feel free to improve the task!

TASK 2. After the first task we propose a few other activities to test their knowledge on continents, rivers, countries, etc. All of these activities are printouts from EnchantedLearning, even though I have put some of them together for 'printing's sake'. Anyway, don't forget to check their website for more activities to complement these.

These are the different activities:

The Rivers of the World Print	The student has to complete three different sheets after he has found the necessary information in a text on line (or printed if needs be).
The Continents Print	This activity features a blank map that the student has to fill in with the right names of continents and sub-continents. There is some written information on the sheet.
The Continents and the Oceans Print	This activity features a map that the student has to understand in order to answer a few questions about it.
European countries Print	This activity features a blank map of Europe. The student has to complete the names of all the countries (the first letter of each country is provided).

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