Mission Geography with NASA

I am a big fan of  NASA's educational materials. I wrote previously about using a lesson from Mission Mathematics as part of problem solving in math. NASA also has an excellent geography curriculum, Mission Geography, which is available free on the NASA website.  They have created different curricula for grades K-4, 5-8, and 9-12. Teaching a gifted 4th grade class, I have used units from both the K-4 and 5-8 bands.

My class has just completed Investigation 1 in the unit "Mars and Earth - the Quest for Life." This is part of the 5-8 units. Investigation 1 is "Where do we choose to live and why?" This is a question our 4th graders have been exploring for the entire school year in Social Studies, beginning with the early English colonies. In an earlier blog post I shared the lesson plan from Colonial Williamsburg in which students are charged with examining the characteristics of several potential settlement sites, ranking them according to different criteria, and defending their choices of site. Later in the year, we saw the importance of waterways as transportation in the French and Indian War. We noted in colonial times leading up to the Revolutionary War that the colonies were all on the Atlantic coast and the major cities were all ports.

"Where do we choose to live and why?" reinforces these aspects of geography in history and brings the ideas into the present. In the first activity, Students are introduced to the concepts of patterns, dispersion and density in populations. Then students are given a satellite photo of New England at night, so what you see are the lights of human activity. The photo is not identified, so the first task students have is to identify from it was taken, what time of day it was, and what it is. There are a number of questions to answer about what can be seen in the photo, including, what are the completely dark areas (water), what patterns do you observe, and finally, what cities, water bodies, and other features can you identify. In my experience using this for a few year now, students usually need some scaffolding in understanding the concepts of pattern and dispersion when talking about human population, so I give additional examples beyond what Mission Geography offers. I also have students work in partners to have someone to discuss the questions with.

In the second activity, students receive a photo of the continental United States (and parts of Canada and Mexico), but it has been turned into a puzzle, being cut into eight rectangles. Their job is to reassemble it using their mental map of the country, with the night lights of cities as the guide. Most students can easily identify the east coast, and often California and Texas with the Gulf of Mexico The center of the country is the challenge. At this point I encourage students to use an atlas, look for the major cities, and assemble the country from those clues. There is a more extensive set of questions to answer after putting the country together. Some questions ask students to think about why there are no cities in parts of the continent. Using an atlas, they discover that the more empty portions of the country are mountains and deserts. They also use a plastic overlay and markers to outline the U.S. and highlight certain features. This is always a popular part of the activity! I collect the clear plastic from the ends of laminating to use as the overlays.

So far these activities have been a cooperative effort, working with partners, and then discussing answers as a whole class. The final activity in this section is applying everything they have learned to determine where people would settle on an unidentified satellite photo of Australia. This photo is a color image designating elevation. I have been disappointed in past years when I taught this lesson because my students had difficulty in successfully picking logical places to settle. They would often pick a place in the middle of Australia, rather than the coastlines, even though we has been discussing this for most of the school year. I decided that part of the problem was with a lack of scale. Though many of my students recognized that it was Australia, they didn't have a clear idea of how big the country/continent is. So this year I gave them the area and the distance north to south and east to west. Another possible issue is the color code for elevation uses a deep green for the lowest elevation, which may give a mistaken impression of lush forests. Students had frequently chosen the center of Australia as a good place to settle, while in reality is is about a thousand miles from the coastline and a desert. This year I went over the color code carefully.

I had students begin work alone and after about 15 or 20 minutes offered them a chance to partner up and share their ideas. This gave me time to walk around checking on understanding and misconceptions before they worked together. I was very pleased with the results of these tweaks. Almost all of my students demonstrated understanding of what people look for in a settlement, as well as the types of places people tend to live.

NASA's Mission Geography gives context to geographical concepts and allows students to apply them. Students are required to think and use what they know. There are many more units than the ones I use - I wish I had more time to teach geography!

Design Thinking: Taking the First Steps

Sliding under my daughter's bed in search of her collection of beanie babies is a most unusual part of lesson preparation, even for an elementary teacher. But, I needed a number of stuffed animals for a creative problem solving lesson and I thought the beanie babies would fit the bill nicely. We'll return to them in a moment.

I began my integration of creative and design thinking into my 4th grade curriculum with the book Creative Confidence, which I wrote about back in August.  I realized, though, that I would have to begin by laying a foundation for my students that would include brainstorming experience, productive collaborative work, listening skills, and a variety of practice scenarios before we could use many of the ideas from the book. I have some experience using Creative Problem Solving (CPS) in teaching, so I turned to one of the books I have, Big Tools for Young Thinkers by Susan Keller-Mathers and Kristin Puccio. CPS is a method that advocates a step by step process to encourage creative solutions. Both CPS and design thinking emphasize identifying a problem to solve, generating lots of ideas, suspending any judgment on the value of ideas, collaboration and divergent thinking, so I felt that CPS activities would be a productive first step..

The first sessions with my class were from Big Tools for Young Thinkers and introduced the rules of brainstorming, which they then applied in an activity generating ideas for preventing a squirrel from stealing all the fruit from your fruit tree. The students worked in small groups with the goals of coming up with as many ideas as possible and not criticizing anyone else's ideas during brainstorming.  (They were also not allowed to harm the squirrel as part of a solution.) The next lesson we did from the book was machine creation through a drawing activity. For this exploration students drew ideas for three new machines, then switched papers with a partner. With someone else's ideas in front of them and their own in their heads, students tried piggybacking off their partner's machines to create different new creations. Our third CPS exercise was creating a new type of transportation by forcing a relationship between two different modes of transport. As can be seen, these activities are also a lot of fun.

I switched gears for the next lesson and took an idea I had gotten from Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Success, Happiness (and World Peace) by Chade-Ming Tan. This is a wonderful book on mindfulness. One of the exercises in the book is a listening exercise in which partners take turns listening and talking. The speaker has three minutes to speak, uninterrupted, about any one topic. The topic should be a serious one that is important to the speaker, such as a time when you were upset or sad. The listener's job is to listen, look at the speaker's face, nod encouragingly, and possibly say, "mm hmm," but nothing more. If the speaker runs out of things to say, the two sit in silence until either the speaker says something or the three minutes are up. Then they switch roles. Though I got this from Search Inside Yourself,  one of the drama teachers at Quest told me this comes from drama education. I chose to do this activity because one of the aspects of the design thinking process is really listening to others (often customers in the business and engineering worlds) in order to understand the problems that you might be trying to solve. I wanted to apply this to some of the problems I would present to my class during the year.

For my 4th graders, talking is not very difficult, but staying silent and focused on the speaker was a huge step. I was thrilled at how well they carried this out. With debriefed afterwards about how they felt as speaker and as listener. Most of them found both roles challenging.

One of the stuffed animals created after interviewing a partner

The next lesson called on listening skills, as well as brainstorming. This exercise asked students to take two stuffed animals and create a new animal through the forced relationship. This is the reason I was under my daughter's bed, searching for beanie babies. She had collected a lot at the height of the Beanie Baby craze, and they are smaller than many stuffed animals, making it easy for me to bring a lot of them to school. Each student got two diverse animals and drew a new stuffed animal, with a description or name. Taking this activity a step further, I had partners interview each other, using their listening skills, about what characteristics each wanted in a stuffed animal. Then they created animals for each other, again drawing them on paper, and presented them to the class.

All of the above activities were done in our first trimester. One of the challenges in adding Creative Thinking to my curriculum was finding time for it. I spend between 30 and 60 minutes on it per week, though some weeks special events take over that time. I have a long Thursday afternoon with my students, so these types of lessons, that are more interactive, are perfect for keeping focus and engagement.

In the second trimester we will be moving into some different types of creative explorations. I am planning ways to integrate creative thinking and problem solving lessons into other subjects, especially now that me students have some of the basics of the process down. We are in the alpha stage of development - an exciting process!