Teacher prepares bag for 7 Greatest Places -- uses this as an introduction to each
place and for students to generate list of questions to investigate
After studying a country or region have students prepare a culture bag that they think
a student in that country would send
What to do with the bags.
Personal Bags use directions mailed to us for our bags.
Observe the bags arranged around the room. Look for bags that have objects that are
the same as yours. Different. Ones that have objects that you wish you had thought
to include in yours. Try to identify the owner of three of the bags. Write your
guesses down. Then have them interview the owner of one and write their story and/or
make labels for the objects. Make a display of the objects with the stories/labels.
Make categories of the contents of the objects. Enter the information in a data
base in order to look for patterns in the objects. Graph the categories of information (bar,
pie graphs).
Now have students bring in a bag that reflects the geography of their region. Use
instructions from Greatest Places Leadership packet. Again look at contents of each
bag. Look for patterns. Have class assembly one bag from all the objects that were
brought in.
Write about why their own personal bag was different than what they put in their own
geopraphy place, their city, their state, their country -- Would other countries
lose as much information as they went to larger and larger and larger geographic
regions.
Greatest Places Web Site could allow people to send in the culture bag information.
Could allow entry by categories. Could have raw material for people to see by person/class
or by category. Include geographic information as well as age/grade/ time of year, size of town, urban, rural, suburban.
Kids could look for geographic patterns, city vs urban, level of students
Could have a Greatest Places piece of infomation collected each month/season. What
if any flowers are blooming in your region? what is the biggest leaf? What games
are kids your age playing.
Linda Brown
Carnegie Science Center
412-237-1664
[email protected]