Students will travel around the world on a visual scavenger hunt. They will select a handful of important natural and cultural characteristics of places. They will then search through magazines such as National Geographic for photographs that illustrate the range of those characteristics. They will also chart the locations they find on a map of the world.

Geography, earth science, social studies

Standard 4: "The physical and human characteristics of places"

Two to four hours

• Computer with Internet access (optional)
• National Geographic Magazine, World, Traveler, travel brochures
• Blank Xpeditions outline maps of the world
• Colored pencils or markers

Students will

• understand the geographic concept of place;
• become familiar with a few of the social and cultural characteristics that help define places;
• be able to recognize some of these characteristics in photographs; and
• be able to find different places on a map of the world.

Gather magazines, books, and travel brochures which illustrate places all around the world. This collection—along with atlases, encyclopedias, and (if available) a networked computer for surfing the Internet—can become a geographic discovery center that serves your classroom for years.

Lead a class discussion about the natural and cultural characteristics of places. Natural characteristics include climate, landforms, soil, vegetation, and animal life. Cultural characteristics include languages, religions, political systems, economic systems, settlement patterns, transportation networks, and other manifestations of human activity.

Focus on the community served by your school. What attributes define it as a geographic place? Questions for your students to discuss include the following:

• Who lives in your community?
• Is the neighborhood rural or urban?
• Do the people of your community speak several different languages or only one?
• How cold does it get in the winter? How warm in the summer?
• Does it rain much?
• Are there mountains, beaches, rivers, or deserts nearby?

Along with the class, select a handful of important criteria that help to define a place. Some of the most important include population density, temperature, annual precipitation, and the ruggedness of the terrain, although there are plenty of other possibilities.

List a range of extreme possibilities for these different factors. For example, there are densely settled places such as Tokyo, Los Angeles, and New York City, and places which are virtually uninhabited such as the continent of Antarctica. There are rainy places such as the rain forests of Amazonia, the Congo, and Washington State's Olympic Peninsula, and there are dry places such as the Mojave, Atacama, and Sahara deserts. There are places where English, or Spanish, or Hindi is the prevalent language. Your class's list might include populous and non-populous, wet and dry, warm and cold, predominantly English-speaking and predominantly non-English speaking, and so on.

Challenge your students to look through the collection of books, magazines, travel brochures, and Web sites to find illustrations of places that exemplify characteristics on the list you made.

If you have enough magazines and brochures to go around, you can have your students cut out pictures of the places they find and present them in a chart or on a map of the world. If you'd like to preserve your resource collection for another class, you can simply have students name and sketch the places they find. Share students' work in your classroom or other public areas such as hallway display cases.

Review the maps or charts that students prepare to display their findings.

• If your students have Internet access, ask them to visit X4 in Xpedition Hall—the Locator Booth. Using photographs and maps, this Xpedition challenges visitors to identify different places in South America based on rainfall, population density, and terrain.
  
  
• When your students travel to distant places, urge them to send postcards to the class showing the physical and human features of their destinations.

CIA World Factbook
National Geographic: Maps
USGS: National Mapping Information