Longitude and Latitude

Friday, Kellen's (8) science lesson was about the trade winds and other weather patterns. As part of this lesson, longitude and latitude were used. He has a general idea what this is, but we haven't done much with it.

He was having a hard time remembering which was which, and I was having a hard time remembering how to get him to remember. I was a social studies teacher you know. You'd think I'd know a few tricks! Aha, like a light bulb turning on, I remembered.

This is a trick one of my students actually came up with. As a rule of thumb, students' memory tricks are usually the best. To remember which lines are longitude and which are latitude, picture a globe with the lines drawn on. See the lines going up and down, those are the long lines. Long lines are "long-itudes". Now, pictures the horizontal lines. They are flat, right? Flat lines are "flat-itudes."

I thought this was a great trick, and I remember slipping up a couple times in class and actually saying flatitude instead of latitude. Kellen didn't get it at first, when we weren't looking at a map. After explaining it while looking at a world map, it clicked. Just remember;

Long lines go up and down: Long- itudes = longitude
Flat lines: Flat-itudes = latitude