Locating China and its Geographical Features

To begin our International Case Study of China, we first used atlases to locate the country on the world

map and look at its neighbouring countries.  We used this opportunity to recap on the continents and oceans of the world in addition to other features such as the equator, tropics and lines of longitude and latitude.

For our first mini-task, we looked at various other maps of China and categorised them based on the information we could draw from them.  We decided on three groups:

Climate -  choropleth maps that gave information about the country's average precipitation, average temperature and climate zones

Physical features - maps that gave information about the countries elevation, satellite images and one that labelled major rivers and mountains

Human features - maps that gave information about city names and sites of interest for tourism

Our next mini-task was to look at myths that surround the image of China that we have in our heads: many of us have misconceptions, considering it a bustling city.  However, we were shocked to discover that China has many deserts and grassland too.  We looked at various images and decided whether we thought it was in China or not, justifying our answers by using atlas information.

Our third mini-task was to sort statements into True or False.  For those that we thought were false, we then used iPads to find the correct answer.  One falsehood was that China is the largest country in the world by area - we discovered that it is in fact the fourth largest even though it has the highest population - with a staggering 1,414,744,984 people and counting!

Finally, using the information we had learnt, we created our own fact-sheets, which could be used by those who wanted to find out more about the country and its geographical features.