Geography, Day 8 - Class Recap

This is me doing the Gangnam Style dance, at Gangnam Station in Seoul, South Korea, in January of 2014. Yes, the Korean girl who took this was laughing at me.

Dear class,

We are finally done with map quizzes and most of the Geography unit! Thank you for your patience and understanding as we finished today and there was a flurry of activity. I will grade your packets in the coming days and over the weekend for your progress reports on Monday. Here's what we did today in class:

Learning Targets:
Knowledge LT 7: I can demonstrate the ability to use geographic tools.
Knowledge LT 11: I can demonstrate an understanding of the connection between the physical and human systems.

Soundtrack: "Gangnam Style" by PSY. Selected because we had our last map quiz today, on Asia. South Korea is where PSY is from, which is in Asia. Lyrics (which are mostly Korean, and hilariously translated to the English alphabet) here.

AGENDA 10/8/14:
News Brief – Tyler
Asia Quiz
Finish Five Themes
LT Self Assessment/Turn In

Homework: Read the blog. Your geography packet needed to be turned in today, so if you have parts you did not turn in (it may not be graded by progress reports), please get it to me ASAP. Next news brief: Gavin.

News Brief: Tyler brought in an article about this story (I think) for the news brief: BBC.com - Kurds protest against Turkey as IS advances on Kobane. This is obviously a situation we have continued to monitor during the news brief section, as the United States is now directly involved in the conflict. We talked a bit about all the refugees that are fleeing Syria - one of the world maps in the atlas in class shows the flow of refugees around the world, which would be a great one to identify the theme of Movement - People. Thanks, Tyler! Gavin, you are up next.

Asia Quiz: This was the last map quiz opportunity (remember, you had 6 possible opportunities with different map quizzes - 3 of which you choose as your best work to be graded along with the other geography work we have been doing). We graded and passed this back in class, so everyone should have had all the graded quizzes available for selection.

Finish Five Themes: We didn't have the time in class to go through the results of this activity, so I will see how everyone finished up with it while I am grading. There was time in class for students to be finishing this, after the Asia quiz. I hope you used your time wisely!

LT Self Assessment/Turn In: Finally - the first graded packet of work for the semester! This was the accumulation of all the work we have done with the geography unit - the quizzes, five themes papers, and your completed world maps by continent (colored and labelled). Here was the rubric students used in class to self assess:

Google Drive - Geography LTs 7 and 11 Self Assessment Rubric

I will look at what students wrote on this, along with the work that was stapled and turned in with it, in order to determine your proficiency grades are for these two learning targets, which is what the first progress report is entirely based on. Thus, if you did not do well with keeping up with your maps, doing well with the quizzes, and making sure to use class time effectively for the Five Themes of Geography packet, you may have some unfortunate news coming soon.

Next class, we will start our look at culture in depth. See you then!