Geography & Trade
Map
Latin America
Latin America can be defined in many different ways: by geography, language or culture. The United Nations usually includes the following 20 countries in its grouping of Latin American countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Columbia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Haiti, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela.
Mapping by Memory
This activity would work well with elementary students. Print off the flags of Latin America from the Internet. Use them like flash cards and see who can call out the most correct country names. Play until students have a good idea of which flags go with which countries. By default they’ll also be memorizing the countries of the region.
Since it has so many countries, the landscape of Latin America includes everything an adventure-seeking tourist could imagine. The Pacific and Atlantic oceans both lap up against its coastline, ruins of ancient Incan and Aztec civilizations dot the landscape, the Andes mountain range runs like a spine through the region and rainforests stretch out across its interior.
Geography Facts
Here are some other interesting things about the geography of Latin America:
- Located 600 miles off the coast of Ecuador, the 13 Galápagos Islands and the surrounding ocean are home to thousands of species of plants and animals. The most famous animals on the islands are the giant tortoises, which can grow to be five feet long, 500 pounds and 150 years old.
- Thousands of years ago, Latin America was home to many ancient civilizations, such as Inca, Maya and Aztec. Today, archaeologists dig for artifacts, such as beads and bowls, which they study to figure out how ancient people lived in Latin America.
One of the most well known geographical features of Latin America is the Amazon Rainforest. The Amazon Rainforest is the largest rainforest on Earth. It is known as the “lungs of our planet” because it supplies the world with 20 percent of our oxygen. It is also home to millions of plants, insects and animals. Experts estimate we are losing about 137 of these species every day due to deforestation.
Rainforest at Risk
Deforestation in the rainforest happens for a lot of reasons, including:
- People cut down trees so their cattle have room to graze.
- Many people rely on farming to survive, so they cut down trees in order to plant crops. Large, corporate farms also cut-down many acres of trees.
- As the population grows, trees are cleared in order to build roads through the Amazon.
- People cut down native trees and plant foreign ones to use for lumber.
Out of Latin America and Into the Classroom
Play a game of “Rainforest Pictionary” with your class. Whisper animal names (anaconda, jaguar, monkey) and regional features (the Amazon river, an ancient Incan temple, a medicine woman) that students might find in Latin America and have them draw the word so that the group has to guess what it is.
With all of the amazing features in Latin America, you can imagine that there would be a lot of things to trade with other parts of the world. In the past, a dark period of trade brought millions of men, women and children from Africa to work as slaves in the region: this was the slave trade.
Out of Latin America and Into the Classroom
Slavery is something you may want to explore with your students in further detail. Give students a challenge to read at least one library book about the history of slavery—specifically slavery that brought African slaves to Latin America. Have each student put a trivia question that they learned about slavery on a cue card and the answer on the back. Collect all of the cue cards and have an in-class trivia challenge.
Today, there is a lot of positive trade in the region. The land supplies the people with much of their livelihood, and everything from coffee to coal to oil is used to fuel economies.
Think About It, Talk About It
Have your students visit local grocery stores over the next week. Ask them to look at labels of where things come from—especially in the fruit section. Make a list of all of exports from Latin America. Talk about the findings in class, especially in relation to the fact that so much food is grown and exported in Latin America yet hundreds of millions of people there are hungry.