STERLING – Brayden Porter shimmied atop the Cascade mountains in the Pacific Northwest and twisted in the Andes in South America, mimicking the action of earthquakes along Ring of Fire, the most seismically active area on Earth.

Porter isn’t a jet-setter; he is a fourth-grader at Washington Elementary. He wasn’t really high atop a mountain or deep inside a trench; he was standing on a 26-by-35-foot map of the Pacific Ocean on loan to the school from National Geographic.

Many local schools have had one of the giant traveling maps over the years. Most teachers just use the maps with students, but Denise Harts, a fourth-grade teacher at Washington Elementary School, got parents back in the classroom.