baseball geography

Home

Chat

Blogs

Collection

Directory

Home : 2005 : April : 16

baseball geography
By Alysia Battista

I took the 30 major league baseball teams and had the students locate the cities and states they played in on the map. The kids made a human time line using the dates the teams came into the league. Then they located their
teams and read facts such as "Yankee" means a person from the North or "Astros" is short for "astronauts" because there is a space station in Houston. This lent itself to discussion about population migration because as students placed their star stickers on the map (according to the date they came into the league) to show where their teams are located, they noticed that they all started

in the north east and spread south and west.

I also divided the class into teams and had them play "The Race for First Place" which is a trivia game I created in which the students can answer a single, double, or triple question (depending on the difficulty of the question) to score runs for their team. You can ask only geography questions or throw in other questions as well. We took a break in between activities (the seventh period stretch!) where I played "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" and "YMCA" and gave the kids Cracker Jax for a snack. It was a "hit"!