Using South Africa as its focus, outlines a middle school lesson plan for teaching geographic themes and location and place. Provides students practice using geographic skills. Includes instruction about major cultural and ethnic groups living in South Africa along with three maps for classroom use. (NL)

Offers three activities for middle school classrooms. Activity 1 uses a newspaper reporter exercise to demonstrate two viewpoints of the U.S. Civil War. Activity 2 develops geographic awareness of direction and distance on a sphere through study of the great circle route. Activity 3 provides associative learning clues and mnemonic devices for…

Presents the Middle East as a circumterral (rimmed by interpenetrating inland seas) rather than circumthallasic (lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea). Contends that, in a circumterral setting, domination by a single nation is made difficult by the weight of the land masses that project into the seas. (CFR)