Thematic Units - Latitude & Longitude

Latitude & Longitude

To teach latitude and longitude, I did several things.

1. One was to use an orange. Each of my special education (middle school) children had one. The lines of latitude (well, the equator and tropics) were drawn on it. Then we opened it to see the lines of longitude.
2. I also had them hula hoop. They were hula hooping around their equators. As the hula hoop would slip, I would say, "Oh, you're going toward the Tropic of Capricorn now. You're definitely in the Southern Hemisphere now."
3. A timely idea might also be to use pumpkins and have the children draw the continents on them and paint them for Halloween. My kids do at least know that lines of latitude and longitude are like addresses of places on the earth and that lines of latitude run parallel to the equator and lines of longitude are lines which run downward from a central point to another central point at the north and south poles, just like the sections of an orange.
Submitted by: Barb Barbbee44@email-removed