Group items tagged

What it is:  The Miniature Earth Project is a great website that poses the question: “what if the population of the Earth were reduced into a community of only 100 people?”  Based on this assumption, the site helps students understand what the breakdown of nationalities would be, religious representation, how many people would live in an urban area, how many people would have the majority of the world income, how many would live without clean world, those that live on less than $1.25/day, etc.  The purpose of the site is to break our quickly approaching 7billion people in the world down to a number (100) that we can more easily wrap our minds around.  The point of the site is to help kids (and adults) understand the real landscape of the world and cause positive action.

“Understanding our rights and responsibilities as individuals and the similarities and differences of others helps contribute to the development of world citizens.”

To help make teaching about the upcoming U.S. elections easy for you and fun for your students, Mimio has created a guide with lesson plans, and downloadable interactive lessons for K-12 social studies classes.

With the presidential election dominating the news between now and November, there's no shortage of timely material to bring into classroom discussions. If used as the starting point for project-based learning, the 2012 election can engage students in thinking critically about everything from media messages to voter rights to public opinion polls.

When students become media literate, they learn to ask critical questions about how political advertisements were constructed, who paid for them to be produced and aired, and whether the information is credible or distorted. Often, such projects lead to students producing and publishing their own media messages.