Feb

20

Learning the U.S. state capitals

Filed Under Geography | Leave a Comment

I’ve come across a neat little game to help you learn the capitals of the U.S. states. You pick a state and it gives you three cities to pick from. If you get it right, it lets you know, but if you get it wrong you get to try again. When you’ve gone through all fifty states, it lets you know how many guesses you had to make and urges you to practice until you can get all fifty state capitals on the first try.

As a Canadian social studies teacher, I’d have to say it wasn’t too hard to get the capitals all right (though I’d have to confess to eight wrong guesses) since the three cities you get to guess from are always (I think) from different states. That makes it a whole lot easier than giving you cities from the same state to guess from. While this means this game may not be for advanced geography students, it is a nice game for kids new to the study of U.S. geography.

Jan

11

WikiJunior: Online Texts

Filed Under Collaboration, French, General, Geography, Math, Science, Social Studies | Leave a Comment

WikiJunior is an impressive little site that aims to be online textbooks for classrooms that don’t have them, or don’t want them. It’s written at a much lower level than everyone’s favorite wiki, Wikipedia. This makes it suitable for much younger readers, possible those in junior high.

WikiJunior boasts a dozen “titles” that cover several different subject and an initial look at them suggests to me that the material here is at least as good as many textbooks I’ve seen. Because wikis are built collaboratively, not everything is covered. The topics that have been worked on are those that someone or other found interesting and so chose to do. However, if what you want your students to learn about isn’t there yet, the solution is an easy one: contribute to this wiki yourself.

Jan

3

Playing a Geography Game

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Here is a great geography quiz to play in those down times you find in your Social Studies class. The GeoNet Game on Houghton Mifflin’s website is a trivia game that sufficiently challenging that I had trouble with some of the questions, yet sufficiently forgiving that your can keep clicking answers until you get the right one. It’s a good ten minute activity to supplement whatever else you may have planned.

Oct

17

An Internet map gallery

Filed Under Geography, Social Studies | Leave a Comment

What could be finer than outline maps of most of the countries of the world? These maps on FreeMaps.jp include the major political divisions (provinces and states) of most countries. All the folks want running this site is a credit line (maybe at the bottom of your worksheet) and they’d appreciate a link back if you use the map on your website. That’s an affordable map.

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