After doing a lot of reading on Geography lately, I am very passionate about teaching and integrating Geography into many of my everyday lessons for any grade. I think that it’s critical to work with maps because I think that most students have a poor understanding of world geography. Students often only learn U.S. Geography, and strangely, I never had a US geography class, so I am absolutely horrible at locating anything in the States, but strangely enough I’ve had multiple World Geography classes and have found it very helpful for so many reasons: understanding what is currently happening on the news, traveling and learning how to get around, answering big questions about the world and how we can improve it, etc.
I like this idea with the pumpkins because it is an easy and cheap resource that you could use in so many ways. They could take out the seeds and do a lesson on what percent of the world is made up of actual clean water (i.e., if this were the world, only 1 small seed in here would represent drinking water) Then the students can bake them during class or take them how to eat or even carve out the countries! There are endless possibilities with this wonderful fall vegetable.