MAKING CONNECTIONS WITH MAPS

Making Connections with Maps by Rachel Walton

I.

Lesson Plan Overview and Description

1. Expected duration: 1 hour
2. Social Sciences: Geography
3. Concepts (Big Ideas): The concept of this lesson is that people who settled in Brazil
stayed close to the coast where there was more resources and less extreme weather.
4. Vocabulary
Grassland An area of grass vegetation.
Improved pastures Humans have fertilized and cultured pasture to be only certain
kinds of grass.
Parana pine A type of timber tree found in southern Brazil and other nearby regions.
Rainforest An often tropical woodland with a high annual rainfall and very tall
evergreen trees.
Savanna Land area consisting of savanna grass, low trees, shrubs, ranging from
grassland with scattered trees and shrubs to scrub woodlands.
Semi-deciduous forest Forest with plants that lose their foliage for a very short
period, when old leaves fall off and new foliage growth is starting.
Subsistence farming farming to provide enough food for family
Thorny scrub Trees are scattered and have long roots deep in the soil in order to get
moisture; leaves are mostly thick and small to conserve evaporation. These forests
give way to thorny scrubs and forests in arid areas.
Unimproved pastures Completely wild and nature pastures of grass thats never
been fertilized
5. Skills: Students will develop the skill of interpreting maps and legends. This skill will
show students an alternate way of learning information instead of just reading a
textbook.
6. Broad Goals of Lesson: Students will be able to interpret and deduct information
about Brazil from the maps.

II.

Content Outline
A. Learning to Read a Map
i. Identify type of map and the title
ii. Identify legend to help discern symbols on map
iii. Find and apply a scale to the map
iv. Find and orient map according to compass
v. Identify region and possible bodies of water
B. Land Use of Brazil
i. About half of the land in Brazil is used for hunting, subsistence farming, fishing
and gathering
ii. Of the remaining land, most is either improved or unimproved pastures
iii. There are some sections of the nation that are used for small and large scale
commercial farming
C. Natural Vegetation
i. Most of the nation is rainforest, semi-deciduous, and Parana pine forest.
ii. There are portions of savanna

MAKING CONNECTIONS WITH MAPS

iii. There are small pockets of grasslands

iv. There is a small region of the country that is thorny scrub.
D. Population, Administrative Divisions and Economic Regions
i. Almost all of the Brazilian population lives near the coast of the country.
E. Economic Activity
i. A lot of the industry is located near the coast, where most of the resources are.
III.

Standards
PDE SAS Standards PA Civics, History, Geography;
NCSS Thematic Strands and Performance Indicators
1. Pennsylvania Department of Education Standards Aligned System
Subject Area 6: Economics
Standard Area 6.1: Scarcity and Choice
Grade Level 6.1.3: GRADE 3
Standard 6.1.3.B: Identify needs and wants of people. Identify examples of
natural, human, and capital resources.
Subject Area 7: Geography
Standard Area 7.1: Basic Geographic Literacy
Grade Level 8.1.3: GRADE 3
Standard 8.1.3.A: Identify how basic geographic tools are used to organize
and interpret information about people, places and environment.
Subject Area 7: Geography
Standard Area 7.3: Human Characteristics of Places and Regions
Grade Level 8.1.3: GRADE 3
Standard 7.3.3.A: Identify the human characteristics of places and regions
using the following criteria: Population, Culture, Settlement, Economic
activities, Political activities
2. PDE Common Core
N/A
3. National Curriculum Standards for Social Studies: Thematic Strands and
Performance Indicators
III.
People, Places, and Environments
b. Interpret, use and distinguish various representations of the earth, such
as maps, globes and photographs
h. Examine the interaction of human beings and their physical
environment, the use of land, building of cities, and ecosystem changes in
selected locales and regions.

IV.

Lesson Objectives
A. After lesson, students will be able to read and interpret the symbols on a map both
through large group modeling and small group activity then finally on their own.
B. After lesson, students will be able to make connections between two with the class,
then three with small groups, and applying fourth on their own different maps of Brazil
and draw conclusions.
C. After lesson, students will be able to apply inferences from maps to textual evidence.

MAKING CONNECTIONS WITH MAPS

V.

Teaching Procedures
1. Introduction/Anticipatory Set
i. Ask students if they have ever used a map before.
ii. Brainstorm different types and purposes of maps, bearing in mind that students
may describe the function and the teacher may need to define what those maps are
called. List these on the board: road, political, physical, economic/resource etc.
iii. Explain that today the class is going to use population, land use,
economic/resource and natural vegetation maps on the country of Brazil.
2. Lesson Input
i. Hand children a copy of the land use and natural vegetation maps of Brazil. Have
both projected on the SmartBoard. The teacher should show where the title and
purpose of the map are on the page. The teacher should ask the students to identify
different parts of each map (the bright green is the rainforest portion of the nation; the
grid part of the map has both large scale and subsistence farming in the same region).
ii. Once students are able to understand the legend and identify different
characteristics of each map begin to model for students how to apply information
from one map to another. Unimproved grazing seems to happen in the savanna and
thorny shrub sections of Brazil. This must be a hard place to grow certain plants.
Have the kids work with the teacher to come up with some connections between the
maps like this example. The teacher should encourage the students to record each
correlation in their social studies notebook.
3. Guided Practice
i. Give the students a map of the economic activity of Brazil. Have the students work
with their small groups to apply the connections made from the past two maps to this
map. The teacher will constantly circulate and help students with reading the map and
thinking critically about what each map is showing individually and collectively. The
teacher should note how much assistance each group needs.
4. Independent Practice
i. Students are given a map of population density. Their homework for the evening is
to apply this map to the other three.
5. Differentiation
Lesson will be differentiated based on the specific learning and behavioral needs of
students in classroom, such as ELL, gifted (above level), and remediation (below
level).
6. Closure
i. Students will have a whole class discussion on the theories they came up on the
connections in the maps.

VI.

Teacher and Student Resources and Evaluation of Resources

A. Student Reading Resources: List equipment and materials needed for student use.
Provide references, perhaps including Internet Links. These are reading materials
used by students in the lesson.

MAKING CONNECTIONS WITH MAPS

B. Teacher Resources for Lesson Design: List resources you used to design the lesson
plan (teacher materials, to provide background on the content, etc.)
C. Evaluation of Teacher Resources Used for Lesson Planning Design. Attach a chart
that analyzed the resources used.
Resource Title
Influence:
3+
Accessibility
Overall Rating
or Website
Significant
Characteristics Access for
and Suggestions
Address
Influence (SI)
suggesting that teachers or
for current,
or
the source is a
others
future use of
Minor
quality
resource
Influence (MI) resource,
in informing
reliable
your thinking,
material
decisions about
the lesson plan

VII.

Formative and Summative Assessment of Students

A. Formative Assessment
i. The teacher will be monitoring during the input and guided practice to the
frustration level of the students and address the students as need be. Students need
to be engaged in the input and guided practice sections of the lesson. Students
must be exhibiting critical thinking skills and attempting conjectures of the
similarities between the maps.
B. Summative Assessment
i. The teacher will collect each students social studies notebook. Each student
must have made meaningful connections of the correlation to where resources are
is where the people settle and that is where industry flourishes. Note if the ideas
the student has for each subsequent addition become less complex and more
rudimentary because of the gradual release of responsibility.

VIII. Technology/Materials/Equipment
Each of the four maps with enough copies for each student from this website:
http://maps.nationmaster.com/country/br/1
Social studies notebooks
Projection capabilities to a SmartBoard (or whiteboard)
IX.

Reflection on Planning
This is not the first time these students have read a map, but they may have spotty
understanding of all the tools on a map. This is why the input will vary in length between
teachers. How quickly do the students comprehend how to use the tools? Another reason
the input will vary is dependent on how well the students are dissecting each map to find
trends. The teacher needs to gage how meaningful each theory is. They do not need to be
perfect, because the guided practice of this lesson requires constant circulation from the

MAKING CONNECTIONS WITH MAPS

teacher. I wanted there to be an independent practice so that students will use this new
way of thinking on their own. As noted in the assessment portion, if the students are not
thinking as deeply as when the teacher was leading, then more remediation is needed to
solidify this conceptual thinking. I struggled with the content outline because this lesson
is more about building critical thinking than learning new information.