QCC’s Grade: 3, Social Studies, History
20 Communities
Standard: Describes and classifies the physical and human characteristics of urban, rural, and suburban communities.
23 Communities
Standard: Describes the local community in regard to origin, growth and change over time
-location/geography (natural resources)
-goods and services produced
-types of jobs
Social Studies, Geography
19 Regions
Standard: Identifies physical regions of Georgia (e.g., coastal plain, piedmont, mountain).
Grade 4, Social Studies, Geography
5 Regions
Standard: Identifies and describes different types of regions found within the United States that can be categorized according to climatic, physical, political, cultural and economic.
Grade 5, Social Studies, Geography.
10 Physical Characteristics Human, Environment Interaction Region
Standard: Examines how the natural resources and physical features influence human activity in each region of the United States.
Description and Purpose
A team of third, fourth, and fifth graders will create an educational website to teach visitors about life in South Georgia, especially the area where the students live—Berrien County. Visitors to the website will learn about agriculture; i.e. growing cotton, peanuts, pecans, and peaches and learn about the uses for these products; i.e. clothing, peanut butter, pecan pies, and peach ice cream. The visitor will also learn about the physical landscape; i.e. swampy areas, cypress ponds, flat, fertile soil—a coastal plain, etc. In addition, the students will describe the climate, animals, work opportunities, and regional accents of its residents. In order to create the website students will learn to blog, search on the Internet and in books. Students will use their own words, original drawings and/or maps, original digital photographs, original audio recordings, and original video to educate visitors about their region. The site will include vocabulary words with definitions, descriptions of the various components, and interactive activities to evaluate the visitors’ knowledge gained, and a bibliography to cite sources used. The purpose of this website is to show what it is like to live in a rural community in South Georgia and compare their lives with students who live in an urban or suburban community.
Team Division: Grades 4-5
Project Category: Social Studies
Your ETTC: Valdosta
WebSite Software: FrontPage
National Council for the Social Studies
Curriculum Standards for Social Studies: II. Thematic Strands
III. People, Places, and Environments
Social studies programs should include experiences that provide for the study of people, places, and environments.
Technological advances connect students at all levels to the world beyond their personal locations. The study of people, places, and human-environment interactions assists learners as they create their spatial views and geographic perspectives of the world. Today's social, cultural, economic, and civic demands on individuals mean that students will need the knowledge, skills, and understanding to ask and answer questions such as: Where are things located? Why are they located where they are? What patterns are reflected in the groupings of things? What do we mean by region? How do landforms change? What implications do these changes have for people? This area of study helps learners make informed and critical decisions about the relationship between human beings and their environment. In schools, this theme typically appears in units and courses dealing with area studies and geography.
In the early grades, young learners draw upon immediate personal experiences as a basis for exploring geographic concepts and skills. They also express interest in things distant and unfamiliar and have concern for the use and abuse of the physical environment. During the middle school years, students relate their personal experiences to happenings in other environmental contexts. Appropriate experiences will encourage increasingly abstract thought as students use data and apply skills in analyzing human behavior in relation to its physical and cultural environment. Students in high school are able to apply geographic understanding across a broad range of fields, including the fine arts, sciences, and humanities. Geographic concepts become central to learners' comprehension of global connections as they expand their knowledge of diverse cultures, both historical and contemporary. The importance of core geographic themes to public policy is recognized and should be explored as students address issues of domestic and international significance.
http://www.socialstudies.org/standards/strands/
December 5, 2005
I spent half of this past week at the Georgia Educational Technology Conference in Atlanta in the Georgia International Conference Center. It was a very beneficial conference because I learned valuable information about blogging, podcasting, and RSS and Atom feeds. In addition, I learned useful ways to use Kidspiration, Excel, and PowerPoint with my students. Another resource I learned about was "Streaming Video." These files are from Discovery Education and are FREE to Georgia teachers since the legislature is funding it now through Georgia Public Broadcasting and, hopefully, will continue to fund it in the future. I received the code for my school so that we can access these videos and other valuable educational resources.
