Beautiful Earth
Creative Commons License Photo Credit: Wistful ~ back to unreality via Compfight

Last week you introduced yourselves to your new visitors. You asked questions for your visitors to answer. This week we are going to look at your local town and your country.

Remember you can do one or more of the activities or all of them, that is up to you. You can also adapt the activity to suit your curriculum, teachers.

Being creative in the presentation is also important, so check out some of the tools mentioned in the sidebar. If you know another great tool I should add, please leave me a comment on this post telling me about the tool.

Town

Activity 1. How old is your local town or city? When was it established? Who named it? Why was it given that name? Introduce us to the history of your local area. Maybe take some photos and include in a slideshow. You might also be able to include a Google map with pins marking a walking/driving tour of interesting parts of your local area. For those using Edublogs, here is how you add Google maps to posts or pages easily. For Blogger or blogspot, here are your instructions in a video.

Activity 2. Name 5 places in your local area you think visitors should see. Give reasons why.

Activity 3. You might need to research this – are there any other towns around the world with the same name as yours? Where are they? Perhaps add them to a Google map and do some maths relating to distance. If you have a class twitter account, you might want to ask this question to your followers. Remember to use a hashtag to make it easier for you to collate the answers.

Country

Activity 4. What makes you feel proud to be Australian or American or a citizen of your country? How can new residents become citizens in your country? September 17 is Citizenship Day in Australia. Do you have something like that in your country?

Activity 5. We have students and classes from 20 countries taking part in the challenge. How does law and government differ between three of these countries? September 15 was International Day of Democracy. Find out what was happening around the world at this link.

Australia, USA, Canada, New Zealand, Ukraine, Portugal, Ireland, Russia, Hong Kong, Tunisia, Argentina, India, Kenya, England, Scotland, Macau, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Brazil, Spain and Kuwait

Activity 6. Is there a song or music that typifies your country? I know I love John Williamson singing Home Among the Gum Trees  Maybe you could write your own lyrics for a song about your country, record it and add to your blog.

 Activity 7. Write about some of the iconic landmarks from your country – these could be natural like the Grand Canyon or Great Barrier Reef or man made such as Statue of Liberty or Sydney Opera House. Remember to write in your own words, not just copy and paste from a website.

Activity 8. Create an A-Z book/poster/slideshow about your state or country. When Davo Devil and I visited Mrs Yollis’ class in 2011 they presented us with a fantastic picture book called C is for California.

Still got time left this week – then make sure you visit other student and class blogs. Read their about me/us pages and leave some great comments. If there is a page for visitors to answer questions or for guests to fill in information, go there as well. Start making connections.

Have you been allocated a mentor yet? Check out a bit about them from this page.

If tweeting about blog posts you or your class have written, remember to use the hashtag #13stubc so I can check out your posts as well.

Was a post you wrote last week flipped to our September 2013 Flipboard Magazine? Check what other people wrote.

Want to be mentioned in the Flipboard Magazine for this week’s activities? Fill in the form below to be in the running.

One thought on “Week 2 Town and Country

  1. G’Day Miss W!
    I’ve just translated the Week 2 Activities – they sound great!
    Our school year has just begun and Ana Clara friends are getting acquainted to the Challenge trough her.
    I hope the fact that her posts must be read with the help of Goolgle translator won’t keep her visitors from commenting. I’m looking forward to meeting her mentor.
    I wish a wonderful week 2 to you and all the participants.
    Ines

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