Celebrate Geography Awareness Week!

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	November 2010 Newsletter We've been fueling our engines all year, and now Geography Awareness Week has finally steamed into port! Join us in celebrating Geography Awareness Week 2010: Freshwater. Understanding geography is understanding our relationships with Earth's resources—without water, there is no life at all. Keep reading for highlights from our national website GeographyAwarenessWeek.org and enjoy as many water puns as I can muster ;-) Take the Reader Poll to tell us how you're celebrating, and please help us spread the word—like ripples on a pond—by visiting our Twitter and Facebook pages. Have a splashing good Geography Awareness Week! —Sarah Jane Caban, My Wonderful World Editor Dive into Freshwater This Geography Awareness Week Geography Awareness Week is November 14–20, 2010. This year's theme is freshwater, a topic Hillary Clinton and other global leaders have declared one of the most critical issues of the 21st century. Explore the fascinating geography of freshwater with National Geographic and partners such as CH2M HILL, Newspapers in Education, H20 for Life, and geospatial software leader ESRI this Geography Awareness Week. National Geographic invites families, communities, teachers, and students to visit the GeographyAwarenessWeek.org website for activities, maps, videos, games, quizzes, tips, and more about freshwater. Try your hand at a water footprint calculator to determine how much water your family uses—and find ways to conserve. Download lists of recommended books and films, as well as crossword puzzles and other family-friendly games. For a limited time, the April 2010 interactive issue of National Geographic interactive magazine, Water: Our Thirsty World, is available for FREE. Visitors to the GeographyAwarenessWeek.org website can also join nearly 100,000 geography supporters in promoting the cause of fresh water. Find tips for hosting a local Geography Awareness Week event, such as a 3.7-mile Walk for Water or a Freshwater Trivia Night. Have fun learning about and conserving fresh water this November!   Campaign Ticker Reader Poll Editor's Pick Mission: Explore I was thrilled to work with the Geography Collective to create nine missions in celebration of Geography Awareness Week. Check out the freshwater missions and more than 100 others featured in a new book, Mission Explore, on the Geography Awareness Week blog-a-thon. These fun, educational missions will help kids gain new perspectives! Freshwater Classroom Materials The Geography Awareness Week website has water resources (get it?) for a wide variety of audiences, including parents, students, and communities. In this month's Geo Feature we'd like to take time to highlight some of the educational materials geared especially for teachers. • National Geographic's new MapMaker Kits allow for examining freshwater at scales from wall-size to standard letter paper. Download megamaps (wall-size) and tabletop maps of Australia and Oceania, as well as world maps—physical and political—and find suggested activities for use with each. • The National Environmental Education Foundation (NEEF) offers a guide to educational activities about water and the water-energy connection for grades K–12. • Longtime partner ESRI, the leader in geospatial software, has produced a series of lessons and videos exploring GIS and geography. Teachers: Don't be left hanging dry this Geography Awareness Week! Immerse yourself in these materials to bring water learning in your classroom to new depths. Geography Awareness Week, November 14–20 Launched in 1987 by presidential proclamation, Geography Awareness Week has been celebrated continually during the third week of November every year since. It is an annual opportunity for families and schools to reflect on the wonderful world and our place in it. Here are a few examples of how classrooms and communities across the United States are celebrating in 2010: • State College, Pennsylvania (October): Geography and education students from Penn State University led freshwater activities for kids at the Spring Creek Day Family Festival, held at Millbrook Marsh Nature Center. • West Pawlett, Vermont: Governor Jim Douglas and other state officials will visit the Mettawee Community School to attend a freshwater assembly. Vermont Public Radio is producing a story about Geography Awareness Week. • Fairfax, Virginia: On Saturday, November 13, George Mason University hosted the fourth annual World Ball Night, inviting members of the community to join award-winning basketball coach Jim Larranaga in celebrating his second favorite sport: geography! Visit the Geography Awareness Week website for all the tools you need to host your own aqua-inspired event, and fill out our brief survey to tell us how it went! Geography Awareness Week Blog-a-thon National Geographic Education is spilling over with excitement about hosting our third annual Geography Awareness Week blog-a-thon! Log onto the blog for stories, activities, cartoons, photos, tips, and more from contributors of all ages, professions, and corners of the world. Read about the geography of freshwater, share your own droplets of water knowledge, and participate in a Where's That Water? satellite imagery identification quiz. Here's a sampling of some of the posts you'll see: 1) Learn how to use geographic tools from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to "surf your watershed," and get information on the state of water sources in area—Are they safe? 2) Travel with a second-grade teacher to Native American lands to discover the ways that water has been revered in Hopi culture for centuries. 3) Get strategies for fun, fashionable, tasty, and dirty geography learning from a homeschooling mom. Hot This Month Geography Education Matters Video Contest Looking for a unique way to celebrate Geography Awareness Week? Create a video, three minutes in length or shorter, that best explains why geography education matters. Who can enter? People of any age, but the video must be submitted by someone at least 18 years old. When are entries due? November 30, 2010. What do you win? A prize of $500 will be awarded to each of the top five videos.   Great Migrations Education Initiative National Geographic Channel is proud to present Great Migrations, a seven-part global programming event that takes viewers around the world on the journeys that millions of animals undertake to ensure the survival of their species. The special premiered Sunday, November 8, and runs through November 21—just in time for Geography Awareness Week! To support the series, National Geographic Education has developed classroom activities. Click here for showtimes and click here for educational resources.   Final Deadline for NG Bee Click here to find out how schools can register to hold a geography contest and inspire their students to learn more about their world. The final deadline for principals to register their schools for the National Geographic Bee is December 10—registration must be in our hands by that day! Also check out the Getting Geographic activities on the Bee website. Your students will enjoy these hands-on geography exercises. Wildest Weather in the Solar System Excite your students about the wildest weather in the solar system, soon to be featured in a National Geographic large-format film, by entering the Space Probe Challenge. National Geographic Education has just released teaching resources, including science, technology, engineering, and mathematics activities, and interactive whiteboard activities, which will prepare students to design a space probe. Winning schools will receive a visit from a NASA astronaut and a National Geographic filmmaker, a Promethean ActivBoard, and more.   In celebration of Geography Awareness Week, digital magazine distributor Zinio is offering a FREE download of a National Geographic interactive magazine Water: Our Thirsty World. Go to the Geography Awareness Week website to get your copy!   Procter & Gamble Find Your Footprint Contest Calling all K–6 classroom teachers: There's still time to enter the Find Your Footprint contest! Come up with a simple idea for how your school could save water, reduce waste, or save energy, and enter for a chance to win a grand prize of five Promethean technology-enabled learning environments, plus $1,000 of National Geographic products and 30 subscriptions to National Geographic Kids. Visit the P&G Future Friendly Find Your Footprint contest website to learn more.
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