The Great European Challenge
One of the geography standards for my sixth graders requires them to have a broad understanding of the countries and capital in Europe and the Americas. As I was planning this, I had a few things I needed to figure out: 1. What does a broad understanding look like? 2. Do I start with Europe or the Americas? 3. How can I make this engaging? I decided I'd share with you all a few ideas I'm implementing as I'm teaching this standard. To really kick-off this standard, I made a HUGE hype out of it. I came up with THE GREAT EUROPEAN CHALLENGE and ran around the classroom high-fiving students. And they were all like, "What is WRONG with our teacher?!?!" But whatever. I decided to narrow down the countries in Europe to 24... I figured I'd pick 24 of the major countries & capitals and call that a "broad understanding." We're taking one month to study all of these, and each week we're taking a quick map quiz to see how many we can name. So...