What are You Wearing??

This is a great activity to teach students about location!! It doesn't even require them to bring anything but themselves fully clothed. What you do is have the students look at all of the labels on their clothes and see where they are from. The shirt on the left was made in Mexico, and the pants on the right were made in Korea. What we did for the exercise in class was to take a look at our clothing and see where it was made. If you need a little help you can ask your neighbor to look at your shirt tag. For younger students you may want to make sure to tell them that shirts, shoes and possibly pants are okay to do but you would not want to be looking at underwear tags in class. Once the students have figure out where their clothes were made they are now able to find on a map where their clothes came from. I would probably use this activity for the upper grades. You should supply the map for the children and it can even be blown up for students to be able to see better. They can then take a color and color in the place where their clothes came from. This would be on a blank map so it may be a little harder for them to be able to find all of their locations on a map. It was actually hard for some of us as college students to be able to find these places. For this you can have an atlas out that they can refer to and find the location for them selves! This helps them to not only become more aware of how to use a map but also to become familiar where certain places are located.It is also good to see where the most colored area is and that the United States is not colored or barely colored. this would also be a great lead in lesson to be able to start talking about trade between different countries! Whatever the way be that you use to teach this, the students will remember. You really get them excited and involved, It is an important to relate these ideas back to their own life and purchasees so that they can relate.