Shaking on top of the world

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.

“It’s a great family activity,” she said. “We learned so much the last two weeks; the parents should see this, too. ... It’s a neat way to come together for some family time and learn something together.”

Harts led the students and their parents and even some siblings through several activities: identifying places on the map, placing plants and animals on the map based on clues to their habitats and building trenches out of blocks.

Most of the parents were decades removed from geography. But they all caught on quickly – chasing after their enthusiastic fourth-graders from Japan to the Tropic of Capricorn.

The National Geographic giant traveling maps are geared toward elementary- and middle-school students and designed to promote geographic literacy; the maps and accompanying hands- and feet-on activities introduce students to place names, physical geography and cultural geography, as well as teach them map-reading skills.

Laura Porter marveled at her son’s excitement for a geography lesson.

“He has been talking about this nonstop for 2 weeks,” she said. “Normally, he gets excited about going to a pumpkin patch (on a field trip), not about something like this. But this, this is something new, something different.”

Porter has no doubt her son and her daughter, Symantha Porter, a second-grader, will remember some of the information for years to come.

“He hears it, he sees it, he knows it,” she said. “And she loves doing stuff like this – lighting up the Ring of Fire; she’ll never forget that.”