Coding Geography

Geography can be difficult for second graders, specifically where they are in relation to the rest of the world. Many students mix up the county, state, country, and continent. Ms. Jackson and I discussed this in our planning meeting and quickly got to work designing a lesson that would help her students at Glen Lea Elementary.

We started off by showing the second graders their school on Google Earth. We then zoomed out until we could see the outline of Henrico County, then Virginia, United States and finally North America. At each point we stopped, talked about the shape of each and where the school was located. This gave more context than to just say “We live in Virginia.”

After our exploration in Google Earth we decided to make a quick little Scratch program to reinforce the concept. Students programmed their character to move across the screen while saying where they live. The character started off saying, I live in Henrico, then I live in Virginia, and so on until they reached North America. Check out one of the examples below.

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