| Teaching of geography practical activities in classroom is an important part of geography education. Practicalness plays a big role in new curriculum for nine-year compulsory education. Developing of practical activities in geography class will raise students’ interests in learning geography. Students are going to learn more geography knowledge, broaden their horizons, acquire a better understanding of geography knowledge that they learnt in class. It is also benefit to improve their observation abilities, ideation abilities and operation abilities. Then students can use what they learnt to explain geography phenomenon and solve practical problems.This thesis uses literature method to understand the researching situation of practical activities in geography class. It summarizes previous studies on how to define practical activities in geography class, then propose the definition of practical activities in geography class and list theoretical basis of how to carry on practical activities in geography class and summarizes previous studies on how to classify practical activities in geography class, then concludes the classification and characteristic of practical activities in geography class.This thesis uses questionnaires on grade seven, grade eight students and junior middle school geography teachers from Dongying and Liaocheng, Shandong province to analysis current problems in geography class activities. Problems are the bad initiative in geography activities, the less time for activities in geography class, the less interests of geography activities, the effect of geography activities were not as good as expected and geography teachers need to improve their abilities. It gives suggestions on how to carry out good practical activities in junior middle school’s geography class. Reasons are restrictions from examination system, heavy tasks on teaching, too many students in one classroom, less time to doing activities, less supports from schools or society and evaluation system is imperfect. Through interviews of geography teachers shows the effect of carrying on practical activities in geography class.The suggestions of how to carry on a good practical activity in geography are in the fifth part. This thesis thinks that suggestions should meet four principles such as practical, various, exploratory and same content with same goal. Suggestions are as follow, giving strategies on how to design activities in geography class, to encourage students to take part in geography activities, teachers should improve their professional abilities in geography education, to improve and perfect the evaluation system of geography activities, schools and society should give more supports.The last part is to summarize whole thesis, with shortcomings and further studies. |
