Week 12

This past week we learned about the Five Themes of Geography. Here's a reminder of those five themes:

Location

1. Location can be absolute:  I live at Latitude:  30.46 N, Longitude:  91.14 W. Or I can say, "I live at 39186 Cornerview Rd., Gonzales, LA  70737".
2. Location can be relative:  Meet me in front of the bank. Or, "Downtown is ten minutes by bus."

Place

Place is a description of what a place is like rather than its location.

1. Physical differences:  Bayous, high humidity, lush foliage, etc. set Baton Rouge apart physically.
2. Human differences:  We've built lots of bridges and ferries to cross all of our rivers and bayous. Many of the people here have a strong, Cajun accent. We love to hunt and fish here. We love our Mardi Gras.

Regions

Regions are areas that can be grouped together by a set of things that are special to those areas.

1. Government or physical characteristics:  Countries or continents.
2. Functions:  A school district, for example.
3. Loosely defined:  the South, the Far East, the Corn Belt, the Bible Belt, the Gulf states, etc.

Human/Environmental Interaction

Human/Environmental Interaction covers the relationship between people and the place they live.

1. How people have been changed by the environment:  Also known as adaptation. In the Northern states, the people wear well-insulated clothes to protect them from the cold.
2. How the environment has been changed by the people:  Irrigation, clearing forests, building dams, redirecting the course of a river, building buildings, etc. 
3. How people depend on the environment:  Using trees for firewood, using rivers to transport goods, farming the land to grow crops, etc.

Movement

Movement includes the movement of people, goods, and ideas. 

1. How do people get from one place to another? Cars, bicycles, buses, trains, planes, etc.
2. How do goods get from one place to another? Boats, trucks, planes, trains, etc.
3. How do ideas get from one place to another?  Letters, email, texts, phones, T.V., etc.

Your homework for this week:

1. Take Lesson 29-30 test.
2. Finish memorizing and freehand mapping Europe. Memorize 5 physical characteristics of your choosing and add them to your map of Europe.
3. Watch one of the documentaries found at this site: http://itvs.org/films?series=3 . Each of these documentaries is about an hour long. Remember, if you have trouble uploading one of these films, you are welcome to check out a similar documentary from the library to watch.
4. Fill in this document based on what you learn from the documentary and our five themes discussion.

Remember that we'll have a test on the Five Themes on Tuesday. Study! Please let me know if you have any questions between now and Tuesday.