In class on Monday, we continued with our earth science studies by taking a closer look at oranges…that’s right, oranges and earth science. At the end of the lesson we were left the mess that you see above that was once an orange…let’s talk about how we got to this point.

First each group of students was given an orange and asked to take a world map in their book and use it to turn their piece of fruit into a globe.

Once students made their orange globe, they were then asked to peel it into one large piece and lay it flat on their desk. The big idea behind this activity was to demonstrate that you cannot take a round object and make it flat…however, this is done all the time with maps. We used these oranges to help use understand how the three types of map projections (Mercator, equal-area, and conic) are created and used to take the 3-D image of earth and transform it into a flat map.

Mr. McClung