It’s almost that time again! Summer vacation is coming to a close, teachers are getting their rooms ready for their new students, and first day of school activities are being planned. I have found a few good interactives that are ready and waiting for you to use your first day of school from the trusty TES iboard site. Check out Pictogram: How I get to School as well as a few others under the Geography section. Enjoy!

Sorry about my absence over the last week! I had a week long Renaissance Place training to attend, followed by the MCPSS SMART Symposium on Saturday (which was AWESOME, by the way). Here are some wonderful activities to help your students with reading maps. There are 3 activities in all: Coordinate Grids (pictures below), Interactive Grid Maps (the city of Saskatoon), and a World Map activity. Hope you find them useful!

Check out GeoGames from reachtheworld.org. There are two activities: Build Planet Earth and Map Countries and Cities. They are both drag-and-drop activities and work great on the SMART Board. Try them out if you are studying North and South Poles, continents, oceans, mountains and rivers. Happy Tuesday!

The Barnaby and Belinda Bear site is a nice interactive website for young children that covers several topics including geography, map skills, life cycles, and more. This site works great on the SMART Board and would be perfect for a Pre-school or Kindergarten classroom. Make sure you visit the teacher section as well. Check it out!

Learning Together is a website that offers a variety of history and geography games, including one on State Abbreviations. Just match the states with the correct abbreviation by touching and dragging. Time yourself or split the class into two teams and keep score. For more practice, you could also try this abbreviations game or take this geography quiz.

While browsing the SMART Board tagged Delicious bookmarks, I ran across iboard.co.uk. This is a GOLD MINE of interactive resources for all subjects to be used on the SMART Board or any interactive whiteboard. There are 15 free sample activities offered, but there is also a special going on right now for schools. Create a school account and have full access to *all of the resources for 6 months (along with a link to your account to share with your teachers). Once the trial period is over, there are several options that you can read about on the site. This is the perfect time to create an account, as in 6 months most schools will be out for the summer and you can then evaluate the need to continue the service. *Note: The site says once you register you will have access to all of the materials; however, only the Numeracy activities are showing in my Library. I have contacted the site about this and will let you know what I find out.

Another cool thing about these activities is that you can download the thumbnail and direct link to the activity so it can be launched from your own website or SMART Notebook file! You can also print the activity once completed. If you are in the United States like me, please know that these activities use “pounds” instead of “dollars”, among other variations. Here is one of the Year 2 Geography sample activities that I know lower grade teachers will like: What’s the Weather? Please check out the resources and leave a comment about any goodies you find within the site!

Mapping Our World is an interactive resource from Oxfam.org.uk specifically made for Whiteboards that explores the relationship between maps and globes. There are 3 different lessons with a total of 9 different activities, and each focuses on different skills related to maps, globes, and geography (read here for more specific curriculum information). Review questions for each activity can be found by clicking “Plenary” at the bottom of each activity. Below is the “What on Earth?” interactive from Lesson 1 that lets students look at Earth from an alien’s point of view. Students must then log all the features that can be seen from different distances and angles. What a fantastic resource!