Google Earth!

Have you ever explored the Google Earth application? It's a wonderful teaching and learning tool! I used it today to help give students perspective about where we are on the planet. We started by looking at Earth from space. We found the United States and then zoomed in. We started big (Earth) and then got smaller and smaller until we ended up looking at UMS from above. Our progression was Earth, USA, Northeast, Vermont, Colchester, UMS, Us. So cool! If you haven't tried Google Earth, it's free and it's worth a look. But, as one student pointed out, it is a memory hog on the computer. :-)

We are starting with geography in our theme unit study "Holidays around the World" to help students have a better idea of where the places are that we'll be studying.