Thursday, December 24, 2009

Santa Teaches Geography


This morning my sister sent me a link to a site called noradsanta.org. It is this world map with little marks of "where Santa's been" in live action time. The locations are (I think) in every major city of the world, and if you click on the little present icon over a particular city, it tells you the name of the city and a picture. There are even a bunch of "newscast-style" videos in select locations, such as the Great Wall of China and the Taj Mahal. So far he has covered most of the Eastern Hemisphere.

When I took this screen shot (around noon), he was in the Crozet Islands in the south Indian Ocean. Before that he was in Enderby Land, Anarctica and a little while ago he was at the International Space Station (that was Hunter's favorite).

Cool things about this:
  1. The obvious geography lesson. We are seeing pictures of all these world cities, some that we're familiar with and some that we're not, and their location on a world map.
  2. A lesson in time zones. Getting a better understanding of how it is night time there, while it's still daytime here, and by the time Santa "gets to" us, it will be Christmas Eve night here, just like it was in China hours ago.
  3. More on opposites of seasons in the northern and southern hemispheres. We were talking about how it's summertime in Australia and South America right now, making more references to the tilt of the earth.

You can learn a lot from a fictional fantasy character, can't you? Oh how I love technology...

"God understandeth the way thereof, and he knoweth the place thereof. For he looketh to the ends of the earth, and seeth under the whole heaven..." 
Job 28:23-24
Hunter is 4 years, 9 months old

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