New York Learning Standards for Social Studies: Geography

The full standard is available on the state website for New York Learning Standards for Social Studies. This page provides some activities to help meet some of the key ideas in Geography adopted in 1996. We only list the performance indicators for which we have helpful activities. See the standard for the full list of indicators.

Elementary

Standards

Geography: Use a variety of intellectual skills to demonstrate their understanding of the geography of the interdependent world in which we live—local, national, and global—including the distribution of people, places, and environments over the Earth’s surface.
Key Idea 1 Performance Indicator:

locate places within the local community, State, and nation

Activities

Suggest our JigsawGeo iPhone map game to your parents. They can find it on the AppStore by searching for "JigsawGeo".

Print out our free USA map. It has multiple activiities to identify states. You may photocopy it freely to use in your class. Use the pages with coordinate systems, scales, latitude/longitude to practice the basic map elements.

Use it for a quiz (have your students find New York and a few other states)
Use it as a coloring page -- have your students color in New York and each state where they have a relative.

Intermediate

Standards

map information about people, places, and environments

Key Idea 2 Performance Indicator:

present geographic information in a variety of formats, including maps, tables, graphs, charts, diagrams, and computer-generated models

Activities

Suggest our JigsawGeo iPhone map game to your parents. The Easy level challenges them to place all 50 states in their correct positions in the lowest time. The Difficult level gives the name of the capital instead of the name of the state! Parents can find it on the AppStore by searching for "JigsawGeo".

Use our USA Fifty States Flash Cards to learn the name of each state along with its capital.
Print out our free USA map. It has multiple activiities to identify states. You may photocopy it freely to use in your class. Use the pages with coordinate systems, scales, latitude/longitude to practice the basic map elements.

Hand out the labeled page as a study aid.
Use it for a quiz (have your students label each state properly).
Color in each state using color pencils to illustrate population or other characteristics (e.g., blue for low population through red for high population)