Teacher Overview

CountryScope is a four-part activity designed to guide students toward learning more about a particular country and its people by using information obtained from countrywatch.com. You can apply this activity to any country and culture present in the world today. Further, the activity can easily be tailored to meet your content needs, to fit into your time constraints and to challenge your students, no matter what their ability levels are. (More information on its adaptability can be found below.)

Basic Description of the Four Parts

Each part in CountryScope is designed around a series of questions that students must try to answer. At first, the questions' answers can be found within the web site; however, as the activity progresses, students must make inferences based on the data they've collected in order to answer the questions.

Part I is titled Information Gathering. As it sounds, the questions all revolve around finding information about a country and its people. Part II is called Biographical Sketch, and it involves questions that help students develop an understanding of the life of a citizen - both in the majority and minority population. Part III (Putting It Together) takes the biographical information and compares and contrasts a citizen in the majority population with one in a minority population. Part IV is entitled Role Playing, and it provides a handful of scenarios involving the country and its people being studied. Students must react to the scenarios as if they are a part of them.

As stated earlier, CountryScope can easily be integrated into your classroom because it is so flexible in its uses. Its adaptability results from the three main components of the activity.

1. Sequential and Self-contained Parts

Part I (Information Gathering) leads to Part II (Biographical Sketch), which sets up Part III (Putting It Together), culminating in Part IV (Role Playing). As mentioned, the level of difficulty rises as the sequence progresses from the gathering of data in Part I.

However, the end of any part provides a natural stopping point. That way, students who have the time and/or ability to complete only the first two parts (or even just the first one), benefit from the activity. Time and ability level will both factor into the number of parts your students complete.

2. Content-Specific Directions

Another aspect of CountryScope that allows for greater flexibility is that each part is subdivided into specific categories of focus. There is a General category, a People category, a Government category and an Economic category, so that students can target very specific elements of the country and its culture for investigation. The questions in the General category lead students into finding and inferring information on all aspects of a country and its people (e.g., physical land, housing, occupations, religion, government representation, etc). The other categories require that students delve deeper into cultural elements, governmental set-up or economic conditions.

3. Two Levels of Involvement

Finally, students will have the option of taking a basic or in-depth route within each part. As it sounds, the in-depth route has more questions to be answered than the basic route does. Again, time constraints and student ability level are likely to influence which route you choose.