A lesson in Longitude and Latitude.

   My niece was getting married in Wisconsin.  Because we had to travel so far we had to check my son out of school for a couple of days.  I talked to the teachers and got the materials that he would be missing and needed to make up since I had gotten it cleared by the principle for him to be out during this time.  Most of the teachers seemed to think he wouldn't miss much and could figure the stuff out on his own.  The only teacher who had some concern was his geography/social studies teacher.  She said that they were studying something that kids have trouble grasping.  I asked her what it was they would be studying and she said maps.  The thing they have the most trouble with is learning about Longitude and Latitude. I told her that wouldn't be a problem because I had taught that stuff before and I could teach it to him.
    To teach him longitude and latitude I thought it would be fun if we looked at my Louisiana Atlas and Gazetteer and also the Wisconsin one and then compare the two locations where we would be. We would get the longitude and latitude and see how they differ and how you could tell exactly where in the world you were by using these two numbers.   When we went to the Wisconsin map we saw a marker on it that was labeled as a geologic marker.
  It marked the place where it was Longitude 90'00" W   and Latitude 45'00" N.
  The afternoon before the wedding we had some time to kill and so we decided to drive out to this location to see if we could find the bench marker. 

Here's the photo's I took.

Geological Marker in Wisconsin

  The bench mark in Marathon County showing  45 degrees north and 90 degrees west.

bench mark for 45'00"N  90'00"W in the United States

 With modern technology as it is today they had to put up this sign because the marker was slightly missed placed.  We didn't try to go into the field to find it since it was fenced off.

 I've blown this up so you can read what it has to say about it. 

    I explained to my son that when you are living in North America all of your latitude readings are going to be North (North Am.)- and longitude readings are going to be West (Go west young man).  Then I told my son to think of Latitude as a horizontal lane ( LaNe.  The La of Latitude and the N for North) and all latitude numbers must fall between 0 and 90. Longitude are long vertical lines that are west and go from 0-180.  If you are looking at someplace other than North America - look and see where you are in the world.  If you are below the equator you are south.  Then look and see where England is  - if you are to the east of England than that is east if you are west of England but before the international date line then you'll be west.  
   
  If you have a number greater than 90 you know automatically its the Longitude number.  Also I told him to think of where he is located.  If he is in  Louisiana  he is between 89 degrees and 94 degrees.  Lets say he's at a 89 degrees spot- that makes it just one degree from the north pole if he put it as latitude  (n)  and he would be wrong because he knows Louisiana is way too hot to be near the north pole so it must be the longitude number and west.  Once you figure out the Longitude number then the other has to be the latitude north number.
 
 It was a fun exercise to do and I think my son really enjoyed seeing this and he had no trouble taking the test.   

I'm updating this post since I've gotten some hits for this post.
I went to The Great Smokey Mountains national park; while there I went to Clingmans Dome - Tennessee which is  the highest peak at 6643 ft in the mountains.

 As we were walking the trail we came across the bench mark.  I could tell a lot of people have looked at it and have rubbed the information off but here's what it looked like when I saw it.

Here's what Wikipedia says has about Clingmans Dome http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clingmans_Dome .
So  its Longitude and Latitude are (copied from Wikipedia):  Coordinates 35°33′46″N 83°29′55″WCoordinates: 35°33′46″N 83°29′55″W^[2]

To make it easy we'll just round it to Clingman Dome Tennessee to   35'(degrees) N  (Latitude) and 83' degrees W (Longitude) and up in Wisconsin its  45'N and 90' W. 

I don't know if this helps any but it was a fun way to explain it to my son.