Home Geography for Primary Grades · Lesson XLIII · Unit 10: How people live and work
43. How people live and what they are doing: homes, farming, mining, lumbering and fishing
Goal: Your child knows that people everywhere need food, clothing and shelter, and names the work of farmers, stock-raisers, miners, lumbermen and fishermen and where each kind of work is done.
You'll need
- Pictures of different kinds of homes (from books or magazines)
- A grocery bag of food and a few clothes to trace back to plants and animals
- A geography notebook (any notebook kept just for these lessons) and a pencil
What's in the book
A long lesson. Houses are made of things from the earth; people around the world live in tents, wigwams, huts, snow houses and bamboo houses. We need food, clothes and houses, and to supply them people do many kinds of work: farming (plants for food and clothing), stock-raising (animals for meat, milk, wool, leather), mining (coal and iron in the mountains), lumbering (in the winter forests), and fishing in the sea.
The lesson, step by step
Many kinds of homes
Read the opening. Ask: Can you think of anything used in building houses that does not come from the earth?
Look at the pictures of homes. Ask: What is a tent? A wigwam? Did you ever hear of people who live in snow houses?
SayPeople build homes from what is around them: snow in the far north, bamboo where bamboo grows, wood where there are forests.
What do we need?
Read:
We could not live without food.
Ask: What else do we need? (clothes, houses, and, the book adds, schools, books and churches) Who makes all these things? People doing many kinds of work.
Farming
Unpack the grocery bag. For each item, ask: Is it from a plant or an animal? Which part of the plant?
This occupation we call agriculture or farming;
Stock-raising
Read about stock-raising. Ask the book's questions: What is a pasture? A meadow? What does grazing mean? Does a dog graze? A cow?
Mining and lumbering
Read about mines and the lumbermen. Ask: What would it be like to work in a mine? Why do lumbermen work in the woods in winter? How do the logs get to the saw-mill?
Fishing
Read about fishing. Ask: Have you ever seen the ocean, or eaten its fish? Name some fish from fresh water. Are there any fish in waters near us?
Tell it back
Your child tells back, for each job (farmer, stock-raiser, miner, lumberman, fisherman), what they do and where they work. It is fine to spread this lesson over two days.
Afterwards
On a drive or walk, look for farms, pastures, a lumber yard, a quarry or a fishing boat, and name the work done there.
Tip
The book uses words of its time ("wigwam," "huts," "snow houses"). You might add that wigwams were homes of several Native American nations, and snow houses (igloos) were built by Inuit hunters for winter travel. People in every place have found clever ways to build with what they had.
Answers to the book's problems
Wood (and straw) for houses comes from plants, not from the earth like stone, brick, lime, iron and glass. A tent is a shelter of cloth or skins on poles; a wigwam is a dome-shaped home of poles covered with bark or mats, made by several Native American nations; snow houses (igloos) were built by the Inuit of the far north. Farming (agriculture) is raising grain, vegetables and other plants; stock-raising is raising cows, sheep and other animals. A pasture is grassy land where animals graze; a meadow is grassy land, often cut for hay. Grazing means feeding on grass: a cow grazes, a dog does not. Mining is digging coal, iron and other minerals out of the earth; its dangers include falling rock, explosions of gas, bad air and flooding. Lumbermen cut trees in winter and haul the logs over the snow to the frozen streams; in spring the logs float down to the saw-mills. Fishermen near the ocean catch cod, mackerel, herring and sardines; fresh-water fish include trout, bass, catfish and perch.
Worked out for this site from the scan. If a number in your copy differs, trust the book.