A Place Portrait

How good are you at forming an accurate mental picture of a place? In the exercise below you will be presented with a series of written and visual images of the Great Plains and then asked to pull these pieces of evidence together to form your own portrait of the region. Finally, you will gather more traditional geographic information about the region and compare and contrast the images you formed using each type of data.

1) The list below includes a variety of perspectives of the Great Plains. As you study each description follow the example given in your Place Portrait worksheet and take notes about the mental images formed by the details of each source . When you are done pull your notes together and write your own brief word portrait of the Great Plains.

My Antonia Sod House
The Platte and the Desert Giants in the Earth
Hunting on the Plains Dakota Land
Turf House on the Great Plains Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail

2) You have a number of geographic resources at your disposal including these on the internet:

The National Geographic Map Machine The Color Landform Atlas of the US
The Weather Underground National Climate Data Center

Googal Earth can be used to view satelite images of the Great Plains. And atlases from a library are an excellent resource.

Use these resources and pull together geographic data about the Great Plains that you can attach to your Worksheet. Include information about:

  • • the physical geography,
  • • landforms, and
  • • climate

3) Compare and contrast the image formed in your mind by each type of data - the written and picture descriptions on one hand from #1 and the more traditional geographic data on the other from #2.

Last modified in July, 2008 by Rick Thomas