Elementary (Grades 3-5)

Middle School (Grades 6-8)

CASEL Core Competencies

• Self-Awareness

• Self-Management

• Social Awareness

• Relationship Skills

Common Core ELA-Literacy Standards

• Listening and Speaking

• Reading

NCSS Social Studies Themes

• Individual Development and Identity 

• Culture

• Demonstrate the ability to use longitude and latitude to locate places on the world map

• Associate the location of an area on the Earth with its climate

• Identify sports played in the Summer and Winter Olympic Games

• Predict whether a country will participate in the Summer or Winter Games or both.

Ask students to share the sports they are unfamiliar with. List on the board.

Distribute the Summer Olympic Games and the Winter Olympic Games handouts, one to each student. Ask them to compare their responses to the actual lists.

Ask: What do you notice right away when you look at these two
lists? (There are many more sports on the summer list.)

Ask: Why do you think more sports are played at the Summer
Olympics? Get ideas from two or three students. Post on the board.

Ask students to take out their map of the world that shows latitude and longitude. Tell students: Around 200 countries participate in
the Summer Olympics. Between 90 and 100 participate in the Winter
Olympics.

Say: Look at your map and think about what we learned about
reading the map. Look at the list of games that are played in the Winter
Olympics. What does a country need to enable athletes to practice their
sports? (Elicit cold weather or snow and ice.)

Distribute the handout on climate and the climate map. Ask students to put their world map and their climate map side by side. Have a climate wall map posted or projected. Review the five climates and point to them on the map.

Depending on where your school is located, point to the area on the map and ask students to say what kind of climate they live in. Ask students: Can you can go ice skating outdoors in our area’s climate?
Can we go skiing right here where we live? Why or why not? (Elicit from students that you have to have both snow and mountains to ski.)

Post the definition of topography and read it aloud. Tell students: So, a place’s climate, plus whether it is flat, hilly, or mountainous, affects what sports people grow up playing.

Ask: So, what can we predict about how where a country is located
on the planet affects whether the country participates in the Summer
Games, the Winter Games, or both?

Day 2

Post the list of sports that students didn’t know about and tell them that if one or more of these sports are played by the countries they report about, the group will get extra credit for describing the sport.

Ask students to take out their world maps with latitude and longitude, their climate handout and climate maps. Divide the class into groups of four students per group. Give each group copies of the map or maps of the section of the world it will work on.

• Group: Europe

• Group: Africa and the Middle East (2 maps)

• Group: Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific (3 maps – Russia, East Asia, and South Asia; Asia and Southeast Asia; and the Pacific)

• Group: North America, Central America and the Caribbean (2 maps)

• Group: South America

Describe to the groups the research materials they have available to them. Make sure that each group has at least one copy of the handouts listing the Summer and the Winter Games.

Tell students that they must work together in their groups to answer the questions for their area. Distribute each group’s question handout. They must be prepared to make a brief five-minute report to the class on their answers to the questions.

Give students at least 20-25 minutes to answer their questions and prepare their oral report.

When all groups are ready, ask for a group to volunteer to report first.