It's All About Organized CHAOS

Walk past my room on any given day and you'll see students sprawled about, moving, collaborating, and essentially, LEARNING. It's loud and chaotic, but believe me, there is a method to the madness.

In fact, I encourage my students to become sort of "mad scientists" in social studies because that's what it's all about!  Questioning.....Hypothesizing...Researching and Testing...And Again..And Again... until a Conclusion is reached.

In this case, students learned about an essential GEOGRAPHY tool used to answer the question any professional geographer would ask: "Where is it located?"  And that is none other than our friends Mr. Longitude and Ms. Latitude.

First I transformed my room into a gridded map...a coordinate plane of sorts and let the students roam free. They had to determine the correct placement of each point with the help of only an atlas and themselves.

Later, we explored various locations around the globe using 3-D Virtual Reality!  My kids were AMAZED at what they could see with a simple app called Google Street View and a handy dandy Cardboard Viewer. (Photos to come)