5 Themes of Geography Lesson Plans
Addressing the five themes of geography is the goal of successful geography courses. These themes are: region, location, human-environmental interaction, movement and place. Teachers need to create effective lesson plans incorporating the five themes of geography into lessons to help students better understand the world around them.
-
Region
-
Prepare lesson plans that examine regions. Geographical regions are divisions based on language, politics, religions and vegetation, just to name a few. Use a variety of activities to explore the different regions in your area, the United States and worldwide. Ways to do this include creating maps of your community and state, labeling time zones on world maps and looking at different cultures from around the world and indicating where that culture is predominant.
Location
-
Teachers should develop lesson plans to teach students about location. Location refers to where things are located in reference to other places. Teaching students to have an understanding of where things are located in reference to provided information is an important life skill. Creating maps and writing directions are great ways to study location. A creative idea is to look at famous characters from literature and identify where in the world they came from, such as Ferdinand the Bull from Spain or Red Riding Hood from Germany.
-
Human-Environmental Interaction
-
Lesson plans for human-environmental interaction can be a lot of fun with hands-on activities. Human-environmental interaction looks at the interaction between humans and their environment and explores how humans change or adapt to their environment. Ask students to research pictures of your community from years past and identify the changes from then to now. Another idea is to read Dr. Seuss', "The Lorax" and discuss the meaning of the story, or take students outside and talk about the ways humans interact with the environment.
Movement
-
Write lesson plans that ask students to take an active role in discovering the meaning of geographical movement. Movement refers to the movement of people, products and information from one place to another. There are many projects you can use for your lesson plans, such as a tracing where students' families immigrated from, creating maps that mark all the places students in the class have visited or researching where the products everyone uses daily come from and how they got to your community.
Place
-
Explore place through your lesson plans by discussing what makes places unique. Place considers the differences between places, such as their climate, physical features and cultures. For lesson plans, ask students to learn common phrases in different languages from a variety of cultures, create a brochure for visitors describing different aspects of your community or create weather reports for different locations throughout the world.
-
References
- Photo Credit Jupiterimages/Comstock/Getty Images
