Geography is alive and well!

One of the knocks we hear about public schools is that American students can’t even find Canada on a map!  I’d like to offer up proof to refute the claim that we are not giving students a good grounding on where things are in the world.

Springer participates every year in the National Geographic Geography Bee.  We keep it low-key, low-pressure; the verbal questions given to students (who aren’t allowed to consult an atlas) are really testing their visual-spatial sense of the world- which isn’t the only measure of a good geography student.   Students in our 4th through 6th grade participated in the classrooms at the preliminary round.  Each student  is given 7 questions to answer.   The questions get progressively hard as the rounds progress.   What is most impressive is we have 19 students who answered all 7 questions correctly.  Equally impressive were the over 30 students who were able to answer 6 out 7!   As a teacher at Blach, I ran the Geography Bee in my classrooms to both 7th and 8th graders.  I can remember that it was rare to have so many students at the junior high level do so well as Springer students did this year.  

The 19 students who had perfect scores will compete in the finals on Wednesday. Within a couple of weeks, we will crown a school champion.

Have a great, extended weekend.