North American Geography: Greenland

In grade 5, Waldorf students are supposed to do a geography study of their home continent. For us, that's North America. Sadly, however, we always seem to spend all our time on U.S. States & Capitals, so I'd like to make some notes on other North American countries. I'm working with a student who has requested Greenland and Mexico, so that's what we will do!

Greenland

Day 1

print outline map, use oil pastel map transfer method to transfer map to MLB

notice that the outline of Greenland is all squiggly and jiggly (and extremely hard to trace) because it is surrounded by water on all sides

Greenland on the globe (Greenland centered)

find Greenland on a globe
(optional: find other countries that have straight lines in their borders)

questions for next time:

does Greenland have counties? how did it get its name?

Day 2

learn that Greenland is itself a county of Denmark

begin to read

Leif the Lucky
by Ingri and Edgar Parin d’Aulaire

questions for next time:

what do people in Greenland build their houses of?

Day 3

Well, today we ran into a bit of a snag.

All of a sudden I realized that if Greenland is a county of Denmark, that means it is part of EUROPE and not North America! It all depends on whether you are looking at Greenland geographically or politically. When we did the Foods of the World, I included Hawai'i in Oceania. That is because food-wise it is part of the South Pacific. And you could certainly argue that Greenland is part of North America. However, since the task of the grade 5 curriculum is one's home continent, I think we have to exclude it. And Waldorf does World Geography in grades 6 / 7 / 8, so we can pick it back up again then.

So we finished up Leif the Lucky and said good-bye to Greenland.

I would like to say, however, that I want to keep notes here for future classes since I know we will circle back around to it!

Houses of Snow, Skin and Bones (Native Dwellings: the Far North)
by Bonnie Shemie

I'd love some resources for Inuit legends that are particular to Greenland. One big downside to only reading about Leif is that it doesn't make it clear that there were already people living on Greenland.

Other things I'd like to cover:

population of Greenland

area

major cities

famous people

coins & paper money

stamps

time zone

length of day on the longest day / shortest day

climate

native plants

native animals

landforms & water features

glaciers, icebergs, the Northern Lights

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