Friday: Geography and the Football World Cup

BOB TALKING TO US


Today we had Leon’s dad Bob visit our class to talk to us about the Football World Cup, which starts this Sunday. We learnt a lot of interesting things from listening to Bob and asking him some questions. Here are some of the things we learned:

• Countries in each continent played many games of football (soccer) and the winning teams from each continent were chosen to go to the World Cup. Continents with more countries were allowed to send more teams. There are 32 different countries playing in the world cup.

• New Zealand is playing in the World Cup this year. The last time New Zealand qualified to play in the World Cup was in 1982 (28 years ago!).

• The New Zealand team is called the All Whites and the captain is Ryan Nelson.

• The names of the 32 countries were put into a hat and 4 pulled out at a time to decide which group they would be in. There are 8 groups all together (A, B, C, D, E, F, G, and H) and each country will play games against the countries in their own group first.

• New Zealand will play games against Slovakia, Italy, and Paraguay first. Italy won the world cup 4 years ago!

• The world cup is from June 12th to July 12th and there will be many games of football to decide who the best team is and who will get to play in the final.

• The world cup is a trophy made of solid gold (and very heavy!) and it is won by the best team, the team that wins in the final.

• The team that wins the cup get to keep it for 4 years.

We have put a chart on our classroom wall (on the PE display) to track who wins the different games and who will get to the final.

We then got into small groups and each group was given one of the World Cup groups of countries (A, B, C, D, E, F, G, and H). Each group had to find the four countries in their group on continent maps and then make the flag for each of the countries. We then put the flags on the class world map. We had to work together in our small groups, and as a whole class, to complete this activity, lots of careful listening, communicating, and co-operation!

MAPWORK







OUR FLAGS






GEOGRAPHY GAMES

Today we also played some geography games using our own continent maps that we made. We played ‘Around the World’ with geography questions and ‘Continent and Ocean Bingo’. Some teachers who came through our classroom were really impressed at the geography questions we knew the answers to!


Geography Bingo: We chose 5 places to put our counters on and then Ms Gain called out the names of different continents and oceans. If a continent or ocean was called out that we had a counter on we could take it off. The first person to remove all 5 counters won "BINGO!".


Around the World: We took turns to walk around the class and stand behind each person. At each person Ms Gain asked us a geography question, whoever got the right answer first got to keep moving 'around the world'. Some of us were hard to get out!