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Representing
Your Neighborhood: Water
Summary: This activity begins or enlarges your
Present Day Neighborhood map, and includes classwork on representing
your local body of water, if you have one.
Materials:
Classroom Management:
This project is appropriately done
over a number of weeks. You will need to read Building
an International Model Neighborhood to consider the choices
facing your in representing your neighborhood. The most challenging
step is step five, in which parts of a neighborhood are measured
by
Teams might be organized by region (N. E, S, W) or by type of
map content (roads, open land, buildings, water etc.) Discuss
alternative arrangements and building strategies in Linked Neighborhood's
COMMONS Discussion Room: Building Our Neighborhood.
Activity Steps:
Warm Up to Mapping - Treasure
Hunting
Practice locating objects on a
map. Use the treasure island map
to identify the location of the treasure chest on a grid. The
treasure on this map can be described as C2. Generally the letter
is given first, and then the number. To make a more exciting
game*, create a grid of sixteen squares on a large piece of paper
or cardboard. Make the squares big enough to be covered completely
by an inverted paper cup. Have a member of your student group
secretly hide a piece of candy under one of the cups. The remaining
members of your group can hunt for the candy by lifting the cups
one by one after they have called out the coordinates of their
search (e.g., "I want to hunt in grid B4.") The member
that hides the candy can provide clues to help you locate the
treasure by remarking whether each search is closer ("warmer")
or further ("colder") from the candy.
* Reference: Math
for Fun Projects by Andrew King, Copper Beech Books, 1999,
p. 142-143.
Step 1: Identifying your Present
Day Neighborhood
So that each country can relate
to each other's neighborhood, we
have set the size of the neighborhood at two square hectares
(200 meters X 200 meters).
We know that a smaller or larger area will feel like the emotional
neighborhood of many students, but it is useful to have a similarly
sized neighborhood in order to compare findings.
Obtain several types of maps of
your neighborhood. It will be helpful if one of the maps is a
topographical map. Discuss with the class the best area that
includes representative:
Mark this area on a map, preferably
a topological map. Note the reference squares (letter and numbers)
that your selection covers.
Step 2: Scaling your neighborhood
Using large sheets of white paper
or a roll of butcher paper, measure and, if necessary, tape together
a two square meter (2 meter X 2 meter) sheet and place
it on the floor. Using a meter stick and light pencil marks (a
carpenter's chalk line works well!), divide
your sheet into smaller 10 cm squares. If this grid is a scale
model of your two square hectare Present Day Neighborhood,
each square (and there are 400 of them) will represent 10 square
meters of the physical neighborhood.
Step 3: Calibrating your stride
- an inexpensive measuring instrument
Have you ever walked your neighborhood?
It is often difficult to imagine the size of a hectare (10,000
square meters, or 100 meters x 100 meters). Can walking tell
you the distance from one house to another, from one tree to
another, or from one fire hydrant to another? To help you relate
a hectare to your neighborhood, you should all practice making
your stride a known distance. Using a meter stick, mark off a
straight line (at least 5 meters long) in the hallway or gymnasium
with every half meter identified. Practice walking off a distance
of a half meter with each stride. This may take some practice.
After practicing your stride, cover the half meter marks on the
line and walk the five meters calling out each meter that you
have covered. Did you come close? To make a more exciting game,
compete with members of your team to see who is the better half-meter
strider.
A colleague of ours, Dr. Jorge
Trench of Argentina, just came back from Egypt. There he marked
off an archeological dig by pacing along a transect. You can
see students at Notre
Dame University with his instrument pacing an area for excavation.
When they had the site measured, they started to dig!
Step 4: Measuring your neighborhood
(over next weeks)
Using your standardized stride
(1/2 meter for each stride), walk your neighborhood to find the
distances between objects. Students, on a school trip, need to
be accompanied by an adult. Just how many strides is it to the
library from your house or to the school from the nearest grocery
store? Remember, every two strides is equal to one meter. That
means it will take 200 strides to equal a hectare.
Divide up the two square
hectare Present Day Neighborhood into smaller segments. Select
a smaller group of squares to walk in your neighborhood. Sketch
the objects (buildings, roads, bodies of water, open lands, etc.)
in your selected area. This can be done on the sample
drawing page or regular graph paper. Make a sketch of your
neighborhood and transfer it onto the larger piece of paper.
Step 5: Share ideas about your process, what worked and what did not work, in
our Linked Neighborhood's COMMONS's Discussion Room: Building Our Neighborhood.
Extensions:
Build a 3D model of your neighborhood
You could construct a 3D model
to scale on a floor version of your neighborhood map. Coating
cardboard tubing with outdoor paint would seal the cardboard
from linkage, and an aquarium pump could move the water around.
You could construct a larger-than-model-size
representation of your water and use it for a large array of
environmental studies, as described, for example, by Paul Tweed,
a high school teacher, who built a classroom
stream.
http://www.accessexcellence.org/AE/AEC/AEF/1995/tweed_ecosystem.html
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