I wasn't going to include lesson plans on this blog, but one comes to mind that gave me an "ah-hah!" moment a couple of years ago: Shrinking geography and growing energy usage.
As a part of getting the feel for continents and an exposure to their countries I have had kids check their own homes for tags and markings that show a manufacturing country of origin. Clothing, toys, kitchen items, etc. We usually assembled quite a list. But this particular time we polled 55 countries! This from a 4th grade class of 21, in the midwest. Canada, United States, Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico
Colombia, Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina
Egypt, Nigeria, Kenya, Madagascar, Namibia
Sweden, Denmark, Germany, France, Italy, Greece, Russia
Turkey, Israel, Kuwait, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Brunei, Maylasia, Indonesia, Mongolia, Korea, Japan, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, Marianna Islands, Philippines,
AustraliaI certainly don't require 4th graders to memorize world countries - seven continents is enough... But I think an exposure to the political units on these continents is important. Kids will have heard place names like "Thailand" and "Nigeria" and "Bolivia" and associate them with homes beyond our own. Other homes; other cultures.
As we wrote our country names onto stickies and put them on the world map up front, I began to sense a geography surge. The products in these fourth grade homes all came marching from foreign ports, across and above the four major oceans. Thousands and thousands and thousands of miles on the water and in the air.
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| World Shipping Lanes |
Imports. Energy intensive imports. Right there on our wall map: Products that were somehow outsourced for cheap and/or unjust labor or inexpensive materials. It's been going on for years, of course. But the amount of finite fuel used and emissions spewed simply to carry products from one part of the world to another is grotesque.
Currently, I cannot go through a store without checking the origin of products. I am cursed and obsessed. Especially in big box stores. It used to be just an exercise in geographic distribution, but now I visualize miles and fuel. Not that I necessarily need all these products - there are hundreds of frivolous objects that don't contribute to my quality of life. But, someday in the relatively near future, these will start to disappear from our shelves.
Do we wean away from them voluntarily now, or wait for them to be yanked because fuel for such non-essentials is unavailable?
What will the shipping lane map look like in twenty years?
What will the clothing tags of 4th graders look like twenty years from now?
