4th Grade Geocaching - Integrating Math & Social Studies

I love geography and try to incorporate as many geography related skills in my lessons as I can. This week’s activity gave me the chance to integrate geography, math, and other social studies skills into one lesson.


Geocaching in 4th Grade from Anna Baralt on Vimeo.

Advance Preparation
First, I prepared eight sandwich-sized caches to hide in the middle of our school campus. Within each cache I placed four plastic baggies with replicas of world currencies. (One bag for each class), Next, I hid each container, marking their waypoints on one of eight GPS receivers. I organized the caches as follows: Cache 1’s waypoint was recorded on GPS unit #1, so on. I also marked all eight waypoints on my personal GPS as a backup. Finally, I used a map of the area to mark the location and waypoint for reference. (This is a really important step in ensuring that you can locate caches after lessons are over. It is also helpful to keep these maps to use those some waypoints with other classes.)

Lesson: Getting to Know the Garmin60
I wish I had captured the 4th graders on video as they entered my classroom this week. The cheers they let out when they realized they would be geocaching for the first time was incredible. It took them a few minutes to settle down before I could even start my lesson. I began with a short Power Point on the Garmin 60, the hand-held unit we will be using, introducing different features of the receiver. The presentation included screenshots of the different pages used when navigating. We then reviewed important vocabulary such as acquire, satellites, cache, coordinate, page, compass and waypoint.

Getting Started
As there are only 16 students in each of my 4th grade classes, students were able to work with partners for this first activity. After acquiring satellites, students were instructed to use the Find feature to locate the waypoint that had been programmed on their receivers. We then moved to our Compass page to find out in which direction we would be traveling. Once students found their cache, they returned to the computer lab to research the different currencies taken from their cache by converting their values into US dollars.

Mr. Frecklehead is Going to Paris!!!

Received the following message through my Geocaching account from Princess Squirtle:

"Out to dinner with The infamous Turtle Team and the Mind boggling Q & B , Turtle team brought us some goodies.. and here I just happen to have a Geo Caching buddy who is going to the Eiffel Tower!!! She is leaving the end of March, so I think Mr. FreckleHead 's dreams may come true!!! How nice for you kids to actually have your mission completed before the school year end! Glad I could be part of helping move him along."

The kids will be so excited! We are on Spring Break this week, so they won't know until Tuesday.

4th Graders Define Geocaching

Instead of sharing a Power Point or websites to define geocaching and teach the basics of GPS, I gave the students a list of essential questions to answer. No resources or websites were given, just a blank Inspiration map with questions and space for answers. Students were then told to find the answers independently, using any resource they thought would be helpful.(My reasoning for not giving students the sites to find the answers was to assess how they approach using the Web for research.) Some students launched Firefox and searched my “interesting links” page thinking I left them resources. Others, immediately went to Google and searched for geocaching. A few students decided to use Ask.com as their search engine, typing in the essential questions exactly as I worded them on the recording sheet.

Essential questions included:
1. What exactly is geocaching?
2. What does the word mean?
3. What tools are needed?
4. What is a cache?
5. What is GPS?
6. What is Cache In, Trash Out?
7. Are there any rules for geocaching?

After about 25 minutes of independent research, the students gathered on the floor with their research sheets. We then completed an Inspiration map together as a class to make sure everyone had a basic understanding of geocaching and GPS systems.