Last semester I started an in-class project that was a response to a need. I found that, for the most part, the incoming freshman students my high school was accepting had very little geography knowledge. Unfortunately Geography seems to be a unit of study that has been cut from most junior high curriculum in the last decade. Many of my students could not tell France from Germany or Kansas from Oklahoma! As a social studies teacher I knew I had to fix this problem, but how? How do I convince my students to identify and retain hundreds of different locations so I could reference them throughout my course? As with most of my lessons I thought competition, collaboration, and game theory would be perfect. The lesson I came up with was called the “Geography World Cup!” For a whole week the groups in my class compete to try and memorize and recall as many countries as possible. Here is how it works. I printed blank political maps of each continent (including a modified map of the Middle East and the 50 states of the United States) and then modified them to be have each country named. On each day I gave the groups one of the continents so they could work together to name as many countries as possible in under 5 minutes. Here are the rules:
|