Helping Your Child Learn Geography - October 1996

What Does Your Fourth-Grader Know?

CAN YOUR CHILD

• Give clear and precise verbal directions to you describing a route between home and school?

• Describe the purpose of latitude and longitude and, using a world map or globe, identify the absolute location of specific places (e.g., Chicago, Illinois, or the Cape of Good Hope)?

• Locate the seven continents and four oceans on a world map, and point to and identify several countries in South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia?

• Describe the relative location of your local community in terms of its situation in your state and region (e.g., My town is halfway between the state capital and largest city in the state. My state is in the south-central part of the United States.)?

• Measure the straight-line distance between two places on an interstate highway map using the bar scale?

• Locate specific physical features on a map of North America (e.g., the Ozark Plateau, the Central Valley of California, the Susquehanna River, and Lake Okeechobee)?

• Locate specific human features on a map of North America (e.g., the corn belt, New England, the capital of the United States, and where the Declaration of Independence was signed)?

• Cite specific examples from anywhere in the world to illustrate environmental issues (e.g., deforestation and air and water pollution)?

• Explain how the local physical environment has affected the way people live in your community (e.g., how it has influenced choices of building materials, housing styles, and types of flowers and vegetables grown)?

• Find an answer to a geographic question using an encyclopedia, world atlas, gazetteer, computer database, or other library resources (e.g., identify the five largest cities in your state or the U.S. state that has the most tornadoes per year)?

• Tell a story about what it is like to travel or to live in another region of the country or world?

• Take you for a walk in a familiar environment and describe some of the physical and human features of the landscape?

• Describe, in her or his own words, what geography is about?

Reprinted from Geography for Life: National Geography Standards, 1994, Geography Education Standards Project, Washington, DC, Copyright National Geographic Society.
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