THE GEOGRAPHY BOOK: Perfect for Stay at Home Fun STEAM Activities

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The Geography Book, paperback
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Get to Know the Earth's Many Forms with Dozens of Fun and Easy Projects in The Geography Book by Caroline Arnold.
From finding directions by the stars, to mapping your neighborhood,to making an earthquake in a box, you'll have a great time learning about the world with The Geography Book. You'll find out how to determine location on the Earth, how maps can provide us with a wide range of information, how different land forms were created,how water has helped shape the Earth, and much more.
Using simple materials you'll be able to find around the house or in your neighborhood, you'll be able to create things like a giant compass rose, a balloon globe, a contour potato, a map puzzle, and a tornado in a jar. So get ready for a fascinating trip around the globe. (Amazon)

The Geography Book: Activities for Exploring Your World (Wiley, 2001), my book for children that is filled with projects related to learning about geography and earth science, has been selling steadily for almost twenty years and is especially popular with home schoolers. Now, at a time when many children are at home and doing distance learning, this is the perfect book to have on hand to inspire fun projects that can be done with easily available supplies.

Here are a few samples of projects in the book:

Project: The Salty Sea: Making Salt Crystals

Project: Time Zones of the World, Make a "World Clock"

Project: Icebergs and Sea Level

 

TIME ZONES OF THE WORLD: Paper Plate Project from The Geography Book

Did you turn your clocks forward one hour last Sunday?
As we change our clocks to Daylight Savings Time, it is a good time to look at the time zones of the world. You can also make your own "World Clock" to see what time it is in other parts of the world in relation to the time where you live.

How to Make a World Clock
You will need:

• scissors
• 2 paper plates
• ruler
• pen
• brad

1. Cut the rim off one paper plate to make a flat circle.
2. Use the ruler and pen to divide the circle into 24 equal pie-shaped sections. Start by dividing the circle into quarters and divide these in half to make eighths. Then divide each of these into three smaller sections.
3. Write “London, Greenwich Mean Time” in one of the sections. Then, continuing clockwise find a city in each succeeding time zone and write the name in the following sections.
4. Place the circle with the city names on top of the other paper plate. Fasten them in the center with the brad.
5. On the rim of the plate, above the section that says “London,” write “12:00 Midnight.” Continue in a clockwise fashion writing 1:00 am, 2:00 am, 3:00 am, and so on, above each pie section, until you come back to “12:00 midnight.”
6. Look at the time on the rim above the time zone where you live. That is what the time is when it is 12:00 midnight in London. When you rotate the circle so that the time on the rim is your current time, the other pie sections will tell you what time it is in other cities in the world.

It takes 24 hours, or one day, for Earth to make one complete turn, or revolution, in space. As each hour passes, Earth rotates approximately 15 degrees of longitude. At the 1884 International Meridian Conference, it was agreed to divide the world into 24 time zones of 15 degrees each, measured from the Prime Meridian in Greenwich, England. All other times around the world are based on the time set in Greenwich, called Greenwich Mean Time (or GMT.) The halfway point around the Earth, centered on the 180th meridian, is called the International Date Line. This is the point at which one day ends and a new day begins. The lines separating the time zones do not always follow the meridians exactly. Some of the divisions have been shifted to keep countries or communities in the same time zone. In some parts of the world, such as India and central Australia, the zones vary on the half hour so that noon occurs when the Sun is at the highest point in the sky.

You can find this project and many other fun activities for exploring, mapping and enjoying your world in THE GEOGRAPHY BOOK by Caroline Arnold.

Project: Icebergs and Sea Level

Do you think melting icebergs raise the sea level?  Do this experiment and find out.
You will need:  a glass bowl, water, ruler, ice cubes
1.  Pour water into the bowl until it is about half full.  Use the ruler to measure the height of the water.
2.  Add the ice cubes.  Measure the water level again.  How much did it rise?  Each ice cube is like a tiny iceberg.
3.  Set the bowl in a warm place until all the ice is melted.  Measure the water level again.  What happened?  (Remember that water increases in volume when it freezes.)

   When a large piece of ice breaks off the edge of a glacier and falls into the ocean, a process called calving, the chunks of floating ice are called icebergs.  In the northern hemisphere, most icebergs break off glaciers in Greenland into the North Atlantic.  Icebergs also form off the coast of Alaska in the Pacific.  In the southern hemisphere, an iceberg the size of Rhode Island recently broke off from Antarctica.  Icebergs drift in the ocen currents until they melt.
   In recent years, the average air temperature of Earth has been going up, and the polar ice sheets have begun to melt.  If melting ice causes sea level to go up by even a few feet, the chance of flooding for coastal cities could increase.  Which cities in the United States could be affected by a sea level rise?

   Read more about icebergs and find other projects in The Geography Book:  Activities for Exploring, Mapping, and Enjoying Your World.

I Love Maps

Sharing A Koala's World with a First Grade Class

I love maps.  As a child, on long car trips, I followed the road maps we got at gas stations, noting the distance between towns and calculating how long it would take us to get to the next one.  And I loved the maps in my geography books at school, locating far away places that I hoped to travel to someday.  In the books that I write, if there is the possibility of including a map, I always like to do so.  In the Caroline Arnold’s Animals series, published by Picture Window Books, a map showing where each animal lives is part of the back matter of each book.  A map of Australia in A Koala’s World can be seen above.  The challenge in A Polar Bear’s World and A Walrus’s World was that the maps had to be a polar view, which is unfamiliar to many children.
My book, The Geography Book: Activities for Exploring, Mapping, and Enjoying Your World, is filled with projects for children  including twelve activities that help them learn about maps.  You can have fun making a balloon globe, a contour potato and other projects.