A Watery World

Students are given a blank world map, which they use to label the five ocean basins. They will refer to this map throughout the unit. To engage the learners, students will play a ball toss game with an inflatable globe. This activity serves as an informal formative assessment about learners’ geography background, and at the same time creates interest in the topic. Students will be led in a mini-lesson on longitude and latitude. Then they will receive an area map with latitude and longitude information of the county in Hawai‘i where they live. Using the map, they will identify a list of places on their island. The lesson will close with students posing a question and forming a hypothesis about the formation of the surface of the Earth.