Cultural Studies: Winter, Week 3

Connor, Grant, Will M., Will E., Monica, Lior, Rafferty, Gabriel

At the beginning of the week, the children took a great interest in measuring their heights. We were able to see that a one foot ruler, even in terms of height, isn't very much and that we needed to mark out sometimes more than three of them. This became a great way to relate the size of our bodies to other things in the room and the distances between places that we have been measuring over the last few weeks.

Our cultural/geographical topic of the week centered around deserts. Lior had pointed out a picture of the Arabian Desert in a book about Asia, and I mentioned that one large reason deserts exist is their proximity to the equator (Side note: Did you know that the equator is 131,479,920 feet around?!). After drawing a line from the Arabian Desert to the equator, the children were able to see that it was pretty short. We did this with examples from all over the world (the Sahara in Africa, Death Valley in North America, the Atacama in South America, and the Australian Outback) to give a global sense of deserts and we noticed that most of the lines were really a pretty short way to the equator. This was especially the case when compared to the line we drew from the equator to Antarctica, where the children are well aware that penguins come from and it just so happens to be super cold.