Geography Awareness Week is sweeping the nation! Check out some of the local news, activities, and events that are going on around the country for this week’s Five for Friday. Awesome job geography lovers!

1. The Trib Local: City of West Chicago Brings Geography Adventure to Pioneer School. The geography education community celebrates Geography Awareness Week in the United States the third week of November with its theme, “Geography: The Adventure in Your Community”. It invites participants to see their communities through a geographic lens, discovering new things about the places where they live…To read the rest of the article, follow this link.

2. The Chicago Tribune: And now just a little closer to home. Travel to exotic places is always exciting. New sights to see, new cultures to experience, new history to explore, new architecture to admire. But sometimes in pursuit of the faraway exotic, we overlook the exotic and unusual in our own backyards.

That’s what prompted the National Geographic Society to choose “Geography: The Adventure in Your Community” as the theme for Geography Awareness Week, which runs this week. The theme “promotes the idea that the geographic perspective is an important way to understand every community, no matter what size, or how long or briefly one has been a part of it,” according to geographyawarenessweek.org…To read the rest of the article, follow this link.

3. The Juneau Empire: Juneau to Celebrate Geography Awareness Week. In celebration of Geography Awareness Week, Nov. 13-19, Juneau will host its first GeoFest, a free family event that draws attention to geo-literacy and the importance of geography education. Geofest will be held from 1 to 4 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 12, at the Mendenhall Glacier Visitor Center.

The event will reflect the theme, “Geography: The Adventure in Your Community,” highlighting the idea that a geographic perspective can be an important way to understand communities while building geographic skills…To read the rest of this article, follow this link.

4. The Hattiesburg American: Geography Lessons Take Students Around the U.S. Oak Grove Middle School gifted sixth-graders brushed up on their United States geography Wednesday in observance of National Geographic Awareness Week. Teacher Svetlana Lucas invited Shelley Allen from the Mississippi Geographic Alliance of Oxford to come visit more than 40 of her students. Allen brought a huge floor map of the United States. The students took off their shoes and walked in their stocking feet on the 50 states. “This is a giant map,” Allen said. “What I’m doing is telling a story about a man on the map, and the story helps the kids learn about the states”…To read the rest of this article, follow this link.

5. The Daily Herald: Professional Volunteers Teach Students GIS Technology. Four hundred students in grades four through 12 from throughout Utah County and beyond spent a day last week learning a variety of skills and occupations pertaining to the field of Geographic Information Systems.

Though Geographic Information Systems Day was Wednesday, the students, including a group from Cedar Ridge Elementary in Cedar Hills, celebrated a week early. Geographic Information Systems Day is an event recognized globally, in conjunction with National Geography week. Its purpose is to educate students and adults regarding geography and the many applications of GIS in day-to-day life…To read the rest of this article, follow this link.

Compiled by Julia, My Wonderful World staff writer

Photo Credits: Your Shot, John Chimon & John Matzick