Exploring our World Mr Sellinger Mrs Wolinsky Yarmouth

Exploring our World Mr. Sellinger & Mrs. Wolinsky Yarmouth Elementary School Yarmouth, Maine, USA

Geography Questions To learn about Geography we started with some questions like these: 1. Why does Australia look smaller than Greenland on the map? 2. What does political mean? 3. How many square miles is the entire earth? *Our resource is Continents (A New True Book)

Google Earth • We learned to use Google Earth in the • Computer Lab. Go to this link to hear our Voicethread about our explorations.

Exploring Shanghai We read the surveys from our two partner classes in Shanghai, China. We “flew” to Shanghai on Google Earth and zoomed in to look at pictures of the city.

Tracing Our Travels We are mapping the places we visit in our reading, blogging, and whatever other means takes us there. As we do this we add a pin to our Google Map. We've decided to adjust the pin color based on the continent we visit. Opening this map in Google Earth offers a 3 D perspective and lots of options to expand our learning. You can view our map at this link.

Lobster Blogsters Mr. Sellinger puts some of our learning on our class blog. It is called “Lobster Blogsters” (we have lots of lobsters in the oceans off of the coast of Maine). You can comment on our blog at: http: //lobsterblogsters. blogspot. com/

Mystery Class Soon we will join other classes who are part of the Journey North Mystery Class project. We will keep track of the change in daylight reported by each class and try to figure out where in the world they are located. You can join us at Mystery Class.

Shared Projects • We started from the question of wondering how students • • in other parts of the world learn about geography so the first part of the presentation tells you about how we are exploring our world. The other classes in the project took our questions and made them into a survey. We didn’t receive the responses in time to add responses to their survey questions. We may have been unclear back when we described our project, but all is OK and the next few slides describe the responses we received from the two Shanghai schools.

Class Info. From Jianyu Gao Participants -- 10 students in 4 th Grade in Shanghai China 1. What is it like where you live? a land beside the sea -- 10 2. Are you near oceans, mountains, rivers or landforms we can see on Google Earth? Yes -- 10 3. What do people do for work where you live? Industry and service -- 10 4. What do people do for vacation where you live? a. stay at home -- 5 b. travel around Shanghai -- 1 c. travel far way -- 4

Class Info. From Chen Fang Participants -- students in Grade 5 --12 students 1. What's it like where you live? We all live in Shanghai is a big city in China. It sits on the Yangtze River Delta on China's eastern coast.

Class Info. From Chen Fang 2. Are you near oceans, mountains, rivers or landforms we can see on Google Earth? East China Sea -12 students Yangtze River - 12 Huangpu River - 8 3. What do people do for work where you live? Boss - 2 students Officer - 2 Teacher - 5 Engineer - 3 Doctor - 2 Lawyer - 1

Class Info. From Chen Fang 4. What do people do for vacation where you live? Traveling - 8 Camping - 1 Ball games - 1 Skateboard - 1 Fishing - 1 Singing and dancing - 2 BBQ - 3 Shopping - 3 Going to a park - 2

Chart of Shanghai Information

i. EARN Project • We learned that we can connect with classes in other • • • countries through a Learning Circle. We learned that being more specific about questions and deciding early on to use a survey of those questions helps the interaction be successful. Thank you to Chen Fang and Jianyu Gao for sharing information with us. The online version of this presentation is at: http: //webapps. yarmouth. k 12. me. us/~cwolinsky/i. EARN/Exploring. Our. World. htm