One of my new years’ resolutions is to post each Friday (though there may be extras)! I thought I’d start with another curricular post.

Requirements:

  • Google Earth
  • Ample Fake Money (We signed out “Spectrum School Money” from our school, monopoly money and change would do)
  • Radio Garden (https://radio.garden/live/)
  • Expedia (https://www.expedia.com) or your favourite travel site
  • Youtube

 

Curricular Connections:

  • Math
  • Social Studies
  • English
  • Arts
  • ADST

Prep:

  1. If you haven’t used it before, spend a bit of time traveling around your neighbourhood to get familiar with how Google Earth works. Start from your home, and work together to visit some of your favourite places around your neighbourhood, then zoom out to explore a bit. (I’m developing a separate piece based solely on this.)

 

Overview:

You (the student) have just been given $3000 for a world adventure. Spend wisely, and have the best adventure you can, exploring the culture, music, geography and more as you go.

  1. Start at Google Earth, set on your house. Lay out the scenario for the student, and ask them where they want to go and for how long. You can use budget, length of trip and other factors to make things more simple or complex based on the students’ interests and capabilities.
  2. Figure out how much it’s going to cost to get to the airport (or train station or dock, as appropriate), and to book tickets to the location.
  3. For each cost, have the student give you the appropriate amount of money, and record it on a sheet. Have them help figure out any change they need.
  4. Figure out your hotel, transportation and the adventures you want to go on at your destination, and make sure that your money either balances, or that you have money left over.  If there are extra things your student wants to do, they may have to look for better deals on flights, etc. We used sites like travelocity to figure out travel & hotels.
  5. Using youtube, augment the voyage as much as you like: you might show a video of the airport or train station if the student hasn’t traveled that way before, you might show the emergency safety video the flight would show.
  6. For each fun activity you chose, you can watch a video or look at books that help learn about the area.
  7. To augment the experience, we used Radio Garden to tune into local radio stations in the places we were visiting. You can also use sites like Weather Underground to describe the weather in the location.

 

We had an amazing time doing a trip from Vancouver to Guatemala City that included an ATV adventure, a visit to Mayan ruins, and to the zoo.

Variations: you can always pick a place based on a theme that your student is interested in. Maybe you visit the Smithsonian Museum, or go to the Sydney Opera House (there’s an amazing Virtual Tour)

You can spice things up with surprises… maybe you get snowed in, or have other unexpected events that your student can figure out how to deal with.

 

This is a rough format that we’ve found to be loads of fun, and can be extended in countless ways! If you use it, I’d love to hear what you did, where you went, and how it was!