Year 10 Global Connections: Building America, One State at a Time

This term, Year 10 Global Connections students have been on a geographic journey across the United States – without leaving the classroom.

The unit, Coast to Coast, asks students to investigate how climate, landscape, population and culture change across a 4,500-kilometre line drawn from Los Angeles to New York City, otherwise known as a transect, a key geographical tool. Rather than studying the country as a whole, each pair of students has become the class expert on one state along that route – from the Sonoran Desert of Arizona to the rolling farmland of Ohio.

After each investigation, students add a new card to a growing wall display of their state, building up a picture of the transect lesson by lesson. So far they have explored climate zones, terrain and landforms, population patterns, natural hazards and land use – and the classroom wall of MU5 is already an impressive sight.

The class will now move into cultural geography, examining how language, religion, food, architecture and economic activity shift as you travel east across the continent. Students are also exploring how global forces like cultural diffusion and geopolitics connect their state to the wider world.

It has been a genuinely collaborative unit, with every student contributing to something bigger than their own research. We look forward to sharing more as the term continues.

Mr Greg Sciortino, Global Connections Teacher