Geogrphical Resources

Geographical Resources
As I am also a little late in posting I decided to try Viviana’s lesson plan from the CIDA site. Thank you for sharing, Viviana. I found the lesson to be very timely and useful. Our grade 6 teacher has the students adopt a country for the year and has students compare statistics from Canada and to their chosen country. This will be an excellent way to introduce on-line atlases to the students in a meaningful way. I found the site very user friendly and I have also looked at the other lesson plans and know that this will be a valuable site.
I also looked at Altapedia and like Megan found the ads a little distracting. At first I wasn’t sure how to enter the site and then scrolled to the bottom to find the information. Other sites like the Canadian Atlas were very useful and user friendly. I liked the way you could look up information in themes and find teaching activities for your grade and province. It had a gazetteer and a comprehensive glossary. The students will enjoy some of the games and crosswords related to the different themes.
A couple of other sites to explore:

http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2008/07/08/f-world-heritage.html
Fifteen Canadian sites to treasure and protect: I discovered this site on one of the links and thought it might be of interest. It has an interactive map and shows 15 sites recognized by UNESCO as heritage sites worth preserving.

http://educ.queensu.ca/~ecs/curr/geography/geography.htm
This website has a collection of geography websites all in one place. Definitely a Canadian collection here. Some of the links didn’t work but there was enough selection and topics that did work.