Module 3 : landscapes and cultures...

Explain:

  I found this week's essential question very relavant to me - The culture we live in is shaped by our landscapes. I have always believed that historically it was true here in southeast Alaska (it was obvious that people lived by the sea and depended upon it for it survival) and in Fairbanks when I went to college (just look at a map - waterways were such an important source of food and transportation that most villages are located along a river of some sort).

What I thought about this week was that this shaping is still going on. I see my students shaped by the land around them, just as the people of the past did, but more often now I see kids shaped by things in the global world, because that is now part of the landscape - television and computers bring new thought, ideas, and identity into a place that was never there before.

I guess in a way our landscape is changing, growing to include these new things and ideas, and our culture is growing with it. As we have learned, the land is always changing with erosion, volcanos, and other geological processes, but now rather than change slowly, it is growing at an amazing rate.


Extend

  In the third grade we focus very heavy on the continets, so I will try and see if I can get the Teacher's Domain website on Pangea to work onthe school's computer. I have also used Google Earth to take the kids on a "Virtual tour" to the country that they are studying. (Incidently, it is blocked on my school filters, but the kids showed me how if you log in to google maps first, you can bypass it and still use the program, somthing I didn't know).

I will do this because I think that if the kids can get an idea ofthe landscape, they might get a better understanding of the people who live there - that when the student who studies Sweden or Norway will make the connection on why those Vikings spent all their time at sea.


Evaluate:

This unit was relavant to my class for the reasons outlined above. It also reminded me that each kid who transfers in to my class has come from somwhere else, and has a connection to that place.  I grew up and am teaching in the same town I was born in. I have a deep connection here, but that student has a connection to somwhere else. If I can figure out what that connection is to then I have a much better understanding of who that person is and what is important to them. And connections are what teaching children is all about.