The Five Themes Project
Student Lesson Guide
Your task is to create a large poster with all five themes or individual small posters that will give examples and explanations of the Five Themes of
Geography from around the world. Pay close attention to class discussions
leading into the project work time. Explanations of the themes and examples showing the Five Themes
will be discussed.
Read the descriptions and examples below to get a
good idea of what to look for in each of the five themes.
LOCATION
"Where
are we?" is the question that the theme Location
answers. Location may be absolute or it may be relative. These locations,
whether relative or absolute, may be of people or places.
An
absolute location is latitude and longitude (a global location) or a
street address (local location).
Relative locations are described by
landmarks, time, direction or distance from one place to another and may
associate a particular place with another.
PLACE
What
kind of place is it? What do you think of when you imagine China?
Japan? Russia? Saudi Arabia?
Places
have both human and physical characteristics.
Physical
characteristics include mountains, rivers, soil, beaches, wildlife.. Places have human characteristics also. These
characteristics come from the ideas and actions of people that result in
changes to the environment, such as buildings, roads, clothing, and food
habits.
How
is your hometown connected to other places? What are the human and
physical characteristics of the place you will describe?
HUMAN/ENVIRONMENTAL
INTERACTION
How
do humans and the environment affect each other? We change the
environment and then sometimes Mother Nature changes it back. For
example, Mt. St. Helens in Washington, Hurrican Katrina in New Orleans, the tsunami in the Indian Ocean, and
earthquakes and mudslides in California.
There
are three key concepts to human/environmental interaction:
People depend on the Rogue River drainage basin for our water and
recreation. People modify our environment by heating and cooling
buildings for comfort. People adapt to the environment by wearing
clothing that is suitable for summer and winter; rain and shine.
All
places on Earth have advantages and disadvantages for human settlement.
One person's advantage may be another person's disadvantage. Some like
the excitement of large cities whereas others prefer quiet solitude. What is the environment you are describing? How do people interact
with the environment? How do the physical features affect us?
MOVEMENT
The
movement of people, the import and export of goods, and mass communication have
all played major roles in shaping our world. People everywhere
interact. They travel from place to place and they communicate. We
live in a global village and global economy.
People
interact with each other through movement. Humans occupy places unevenly
on Earth because of the environment but also because we are social
beings. We interact with each other through travel, trade, information
flows (E-Mail) and political events.
How do we move from place to place? How do we actually get
food?
REGION
A
region is the basic unit of study in geography. A region is an area that
displays a
Regions can be physical or cultural.
Physical regions such as deserts or mountains exist as to vegetation regions and wildlife regions. Climate regions, such as the tropics or
Arctic regions must also be considered.
Cultural regions can include grouping areas together by language, religion, political borders and ethnicity just to name a few.
Review
the scoring rubric to guide you toward your final work.
Ideas in this lesson adapted from the work of Lisa Keys-Mathews, Department
of Geography, University of North Alabama.