We spent much of our days engrossed in studying our country for our movies.  They are going to be great!
 
This week, we learned about the continents, including singing songs that help us organize the location of the continents in our mind.  We also talked about Latitude and Longitude.  We were able to split the world up into hemispheres and then look at which hemispheres the various continents and oceans fell into.  Next week, we will do some Venn Diagrams to compare and contrast the various continents.  I'm excited to start our unit project next week, it's going to help the students learn a lot!
 
MAP testing is upon us. Monday and Friday students had the regular gifted schedule, while Tuesday-Thursday students had an abbreviated schedule.  We were very busy!  Our geography focus for the week was maps.  We learned about the parts of a map, atlases, and directions. 
 
This week, we took the NewsBowl online league test.  Every team was able to meet the benchmark score of at least 20 correct current events answers.  Way to go teams. 

Our geography focus for the week was the Census.  We were able to look at historical data concerning Joplin's population and then predict what the population might be after the 2010 Census.