Geography

Assessment

Students skills in Social Studies will be assessed in an a variety of ways

Projects 50%
Home Work 10%
Participation and qualitative observation 5%

Assignments 10%
Tests 15%

Quiz %10

This is a common grading scale used across the middle and high school classes that reflects a renewed emphasis on authentic assessments that emulate activities from the world beyond school. Students will be charged with completing problem solving activities that utilize the skills that they have learned and mimic the type of activities they would have to do as an adult, consumer, or professional. Examples in Social Studies would include building dioramas to explain landforms, creating color-keyed maps to demonstrate demographic data or comparing and contrasting cultural elements from different locations throughout the world. 

Projects are typically long term in length and will reflect numerous revisions and edits. Homework activities are short daily reinforcement exercises where errors will not be penalized. Assignments are medium length and will corrected to measure student progress and determine whether or not reinforcement activities are needed. Participation and qualitative observations is a reflection of how actively students communicate with each other in discussions and group analyses. 

Plagiarism and academic dishonesty are not acceptable behaviors and are contrary to both our academic and citizenship goals. Students will be taught when to pull information directly from the source and how to properly cite it. All inappropriately completed assignments will be redone at a penalty.

Methodology

The Geography Course helps our youngest middle schoolers transition to higher level course by building their comprehension and retention skills. One common method is to allow students time to preivew lessons and then participate in classroom discussion where they work together “shrink” big texts blocks down to main ideas they can voice in their own words. Student then use their new found knowledge various and assorted hands on activities including map making, sketching, graph creation and building projects that they then share and discuss.

Resources

The Geography class uses the Prentice Hall "World Explorer Series" , a highly engaging and challenging series of books created for transitioning students.

At the beginning of the year we begin with the lead book: Geography: Tools Concepts

After which, students democratically chose the order of the remaining books:

Africa
United States and Canada
Asia and the Pacific
Europe and Russia
Latin America