“Where We Are in Time and Place” 1st Quarter Project – Social Studies September 2012

Essential Understanding: Authors use geographic and often historical perspective when crafting novels, stories, or other works of fiction. Understanding the real life historical events as well as the relationship between people and their natural and constructed environments is often a key part of a story’s plot, theme, or setting.

Essential Questions What are the two ways to think about “location” and how is each one useful? How do human and physical features help us understand a place? What makes one area like another? How do people, goods, and ideas get from one place to another? How do people and the environment affect each other? How is historical fiction different from historical narrative, memoir and biographies? How can historical fiction deepen our understanding of the past?

Read a novel/memoir/biography of your choice Read a novel/memoir/biography of your choice. Evaluate and analyze the geographic and historical perspectives and how they are important to a reader’s thorough understanding of the story. *** Using the “5 Themes of Geography” as a basic framework, explain the “time and place” of your story. Location Place Human Environmental Interaction Movement Region

Absolute Location gives the exact spot on the earth where a place is found using latitude and longitude. Copenhagen, Denmark (Number the Stars) Coordinates: 55°40′34″N 12°34′06″E

Relative Location is not an exact location Relative Location is not an exact location. It tells where a place is by describing places near it. Located in north central Europe, Denmark is   bordered in the south by Germany. Denmark is ringed by bodies of water including the Baltic Sea, North Sea, Kattegat Bay, Kiel Bay and the Skaggerak Strait.

Place : describes the human and physical characteristics of a location. Create slides to help a potential reader better understand what locations in your story are like. The thoughts people have about a place come from their experiences. How people describe a place tells you how they think. It tells you what is important to them. Think about the human and physical features in your book. How do they shape the character’s lives? What pictures should a potential reader have in their minds to best understand the story? Human characteristics: include the human-designed cultural features of a place, from land use and architecture to forms of livelihood and religion to food and folk ways to transportation and communication networks.

Physical characteristics : include a description of such things as the mountains, rivers, beaches, topography, and animal and plant life of a place. Example: In reading “City of the Beasts” by Isabel Allende, one must understand the geography of the Amazon and tepuis.

Human characteristics: include the human-designed cultural features of a place, from land use and architecture to forms of livelihood and religion to food and folk ways to transportation and communication networks.

Why might these images be important to a reader of “Number the Stars?

Human Environmental Interaction This theme considers how humans depend on, adapt to and modify the environment. Humans shape the landscape through their interaction with the land; this has both positive and negative effects on the environment. How can this theme be seen in your book?

People use their environment in different ways. In dry areas, people might build dams to collect large amounts of water. Then people can use the water during dry periods when there is no rain. In wet areas, people might use boats to travel from place to place. Some changes people make can cause problems. Pollution is a problem. Sometimes, weather can harm people. Some areas have floods, mudslides, or wildfires.

How do people depend on the environment How do people depend on the environment? (Example: In ancient times, the annual flooding of the Nile River produced good soil for growing crops.) How to people adapt to the environment? (Example: The ancient Egyptians rebuilt their homes each year, after the annual flooding. As time went on, they built their homes above the flood plain.)  How do people modify the environment? (Example: The ancient Egyptians built irrigation ditches to help water the crops. In modern times, Egypt built a dam to control the flood waters of the Nile River.) 

How could understanding the Nile River flooding help a reader with this book?

Movement Humans move, a lot Movement Humans move, a lot! Movement refers to the way people, move from one place to another. This can be local such as how did you get to school today, or it can be global such as how did humans get to North America?  In addition, ideas, information fads, goods, resources, and communication all travel distances. This theme studies movement and migration across the planet.

Ancient trade routes called the Silk Road allowed people, goods and ideas to travel across Europe and Asia. (How would your life change if you had to travel by horse or camel?)

Types of Regions http://www. nationalgeographic Natural/Physical Regions Cultural Regions Based upon the spatial distribution of a physical trait; for example, climate, vegetation, soil, landforms (use page 8 – link above -for a review of formal, functional and vernacular region) Based upon the spatial distribution of a cultural trait; for example, language, religion, food, music, clothing

http://fmwriters.com/Visionback/Issue34/historicalfic.htm Many of you selected a book that falls under the category of Historical Fiction. But historical fiction can take many different forms and what is it really? Use the link above to read an excellent explanation by Scott Dalton to better understand this genre and why it is important in our Social Studies classroom. “We write historical fiction, and read it, not to learn about history so much as to live it. It is the closest we can get to experiencing the past without having been there. We finish a history and think ‘So that's what happened!’ We finish a work of historical fiction, catch our breath, and think ‘So that's what it was like!’ ”

For example: “Catherine Called Birdy” contains information about the food, dress, religious beliefs, manners, health, medical practices, and sanitary habits (or lack thereof) typical of medieval England in 1290. From the number of fleas she kills in an evening to her herbal medicines, Birdy tells facts about her time period but also shows readers the mind set of medieval people.

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