Past projects

From Māori and MMP to Mt. Cook

A Geographic Journey of New Zealand Using the Five Themes

Prepared by Erika Cook as part of the Fulbright-Hays Seminars 2002.

Grade: 9

This lesson was created for a ninth grade World Cultures class. However, the nature of this lesson is easily adaptable for other levels.

Executive summary

The five themes of geography, created by National Geographic, are usually taught at the beginning of the school year and forgotten by students throughout the rest of the course. Applying the five themes of geography to a specific country in the region of Oceania will review the themes while learning new geographic information.

New Zealand and the islands of the Pacific are countries that are usually ignored when Oceania even exists in a world geography curriculum. Lessons and published material on these lands are minimal in school and public libraries. Most often, Oceania, if present, consists of Australia in school texts. Therefore, teachers tend not to address these unknown lands; American youth continue to be ignorant about this region of their world. This lesson is an attempt to introduce New Zealand to students by showing slides of twenty chosen sites, people, actions and cultural symbols. Students will apply the five themes of geography to each narrated slide.

Students will be assessed by not only by orally reviewing the five themes of geography, and synthesizing them in a written format, but also creating a five themes of geography travel brochure on a different country in Oceania.

Table of contents

• Summary
• Grade level
• Objectives
• Materials
• Key questions
• Procedures
• Assessment
• Follow-up activities
• Slide show captions
• References and additional resources

From Māori and MMP to Mt. Cook: A Geographic Journey of New Zealand Using the Five Themes

cooke.pdf (84kB)