But this year we have a fantastic new social studies staff developer and we're teaching geography for real! Fifth graders are studying landforms, and third and fourth are studying maps. Third graders will even choose different countries to study as a class!
So far, we've just looked at our neighborhood and school and explored other places with and without layers like borders and roads. They've discovered many other features, but I think I want to focus now on the earth itself, more than on using the program. A third grader was frustrated that he wasn't seeing any buildings when he zoomed in on a random spot, which led to a fascinating discussion about cities vs farm/desert/forest land and suburbs, and why cities were settled in particular places.
My next challenge is coming up with a way to document these conversations (and to have students create something from their explorations) without having them write, which they do plenty of during the rest of the day, and which tends to slow down their thinking. Maybe this is the push I need to start using Voicethread? Or would screenshots in iMovie be simpler? Or maybe I need to actually read some of those Google Earth blogs I've subscribed to and see what other people in k-5 are doing.
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