Geocaching in the Classroom

I have become very interested in geocaching with elementary students since hearing about it at the TCEA convention in February. I have ordered a geomate.jr GPS unit that is highly recommended for kids and have found a wealth of sites that talk about "educaching."  There is SO MUCH you can do with GPS units in the classroom and I can't wait to do some fun stuff with our BES students!

Here are some classroom ideas...

Math

• Create a path and at each turn tell your partner the angle to measure to make the turn.
• Have students walk and plot on a map the end points of a given shape and see their result.
• Find the elevations of different points and graph those elevations.
• Have students go outside and step off an area, graph it, and then find the area or perimeter.
• Practice adding and subtracting 3-digit numbers to come up with GPS coordinates to travel from one cache to another.

Science

• Make a botanical tour of your campus marking the locations of different plants and include a tour guide that gives each plant's scientific name and characteristics.
• Give your students the locations of different types of rocks.  Their job is to classify each rock when they find the cache.
• Create a virtual outdoor classroom by marking the locations of different habitats to visit as examples.

Language Arts

• Hide different parts of a sequential story in different caches around your campus.  Students must find each part of the story and decide the proper sequence.
• After reading a class story, hide props for the characters/setting/etc. and have students locate them with the GPS.  Meet back together to do a retelling of the story.
• Send students to a coordinate and have them write a description of the object they find there.

Here are some helpful sites I found...

http://www.terraclues.com/
https://sites.google.com/site/fisdgeocaching/lessons
http://www.geocaching.com/default.aspx
http://www.educaching.com/
http://educacher.blogspot.com/