Last night students read about rural landscape patterns and traditional housing types. Today in class after reviewing the four types of traditional housing, we viewed Google Earth’s, “This is Home,” Voyage, and they chose four of the 20+ locations that highlighted traditional housing from various regions of the world. They then wrote in their notebooks what type of rural settlement pattern they observed from an aerial perspective, the traditional housing type they zoomed in to, and then “stepped inside” traditional homes around the globe. They then read the descriptions that Google provided to tell me how geographic site locations impacted the traditional architecture of that place. A girl told me, “How did you know this was here?” “How did you find this activity that fits so perfectly to what we are learning.” I swear, it was the biggest compliment ever, and so extremely gratifying. The kids enjoyed it on their iPads.

Download This is Home PDF Worksheet Here: Traditional Housing Google Voyager

AP Human Geography Course Standards:

• Explain how culture is expressed in landscapes and how land and resource use represents cultural identity
  • Cultural landscapes are amalgamations of physical features, agricultural and industrial practices, religious and linguistic characteristics, and other expressions of culture (e.g., architecture)
• Settlement patterns and rural land use are reflected in the cultural landscape
  • Identify rural settlement patterns
    • Rural settlement patterns are classified as clustered, dispersed, or linear