How Google Earth Saved my Social Studies Unit

I have to admit, I sometimes dread planning for social studies lessons.  Mostly due to the fact that we have standards to cover, but not a whole lot of resources to implement stellar lessons.  My first grade students needed to learn about maps, landforms, and identify suburban, urban & rural areas. Yikes.

I did what desperate teachers do... looked back at my plans for this unit from last year.  I wasn't overly impressed with my 2019 self.  At all.

I had thought to check out Google Earth, which is an app I was familiar with and have explored on random "roll the dice" expeditions from time to time.  I started the unit by having students explore a Google Map of their community.  (I had my iPad projected on the SmartTV) My students were cheering with excitement when they saw familiar landmarks on the map.  They were interested in finding their own houses and asked if they could go home and learn their address to look up the next school day. I have never had so many kids beg for homework!  This was also a perfect segway into learning about map symbols.  They were able to identify shopping centers, gas stations, fire stations, etc.

Landforms was next.  I can't speak highly enough of the engagement I experienced with this one!  I had to do some work on my own finding real examples of landforms on Google Earth, but it was beyond worth it.  Students were asked to choose 3 landforms that were interesting to them.  They explored the examples I gave and screenshot their experience. They used the screenshots to create a Clips video sharing what they had learned.  This lesson was very successful and I can't even begin to explain how much more students got out of this lesson being able to see landforms such as Mt. Everest in 3D.

We ended the unit exploring rural, urban & suburban areas.  Once again, I provided examples of these for students to more easily pull from to expedite the lesson.  Students chose an area, watched a QR code for the corresponding Brain Pop Jr. video, then explored the real life examples on Google Earth.  They were then matched with students who researched one of the other area types.  They taught each other about their findings using an adapted AVID strategy.  I heard amazing student-to student questions, such as "why are there always a house next to the farms?"... questions students would never organically come up with from a text.  

Do yourself a favor and find some time to play around with Google Earth.  There are endless possibilities to use in your classroom.  Try it out with students and let me know how it goes.  I'm also happy to share any templates mentioned in this post. :)