Presentation  —  The Workshop 2 slides can be seen here.

Summary —  We continued our efforts in the Learning Through Maps/Mapping Our Learning workshop series during our second workshop on November 12th.  Eight teachers from workshop #1 were able to join us and we welcomed two new participants, for a total of ten teachers.  This second workshop was focused on exploring possible activities to use in conjunction with PuzzleMap.  These activities aligned with Common Core State Standards for Reading and Math at various grade levels and were designed to engage students in fun and interactive activities that encouraged them to apply information from PuzzleMap.

Working in small groups, teachers chose from a menu of options.  The activities selected to try out included writing and illustrating post-cards describing where teachers’ virtual travels had taken them, GIST-style summary writing about a particular country or region, using text features to locate information efficiently and creating an “Escape Room”-style PuzzleMap challenge in which students would have to find the correct state abbreviations to crack the four digit “escape” code.  Later, teachers presented their work to one another.

We also completed a jigsaw-style reading of the professional article: Hinde, Osborn Popp, Jimenez-Silva, & Dorn, (2011) "Linking geography to reading and English language learners’ achievement in US elementary and middle school classrooms" International Research in Geographical and Environmental Education, 20(1), 47-63.  We discussed key ideas from the article, namely that the research done by Hinde and colleagues demonstrated that students learning English as a second language improved their reading skills during a series of geography-focused literacy lessons.

Next Time —  Our third workshop, scheduled for December 10th, will focus on teachers working in small, grade-band groups to begin planning how to use currently existing PuzzleMaps to support their current curriculum as well as to begin thinking about and planning content for future PuzzleMaps.