Geography of the Olympics

Geography of the Olympics: Classroom Resources Available from Ball State University Libraries

The Ball State University Libraries’ GIS Research and Map Collection (GRMC) offers custom cartographic classroom resources available from the Cardinal Scholar institutional repository.  Cardinal Scholar allows users to access these invaluable resources from any location with Web availability.

The GRMC created a geography lesson for middle and high school teachers that incorporates the recent interest in the Olympic Games in London.  Geography of the Olympics is a worksheet listing all the previous and future sites of the Summer and Winter Olympics.  Teachers print a copy of a world map to accompany the GRMC worksheet, and students mark the locations of each of the Olympic sites.  The students then answer analytical questions about the Olympics based on trends on the map:  Which continents have never hosted any Olympics? Why were no Olympics held in 1940 or 1944?

Storybook Map of England is a map created by the GRMC to commemorate popular children’s literature written by English authors.  The London 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony featured some of these popular books and characters. 

Teachers and student-teachers headed back to the classroom can find numerous other maps, cartographic tutorials, games, posters, lesson plans, map worksheets and other resources in Cardinal Scholar.  These classroom resources were developed specifically for K-12 teachers but may be used for any research and learning projects.  

To find all of the available resources from the GRMC in Cardinal Scholar, click on “Communities and Collections” on the left side of the page.  Scroll down to the Information Technology section and the GIS Research and Map Collection will be listed under University Libraries.  On the GRMC collection home page, click on “browse by title” in the middle of the page.  This lists all the titles in the collection.  For a more specific search, you may also enter a subject or geographic location such as “Africa” or a keyword such as “game.”  Users can save the documents for use in papers, presentations, or classroom activities or print any of the materials.

For more information about any of these classroom resources, please contact the GRMC at 765-285-1097.