Touring Our World – Inside And Out

By Laurie Borst

If you stopped by the Hawley School gym on Monday, December 4, you would have found it filled with a 20-foot-tall balloon, hand painted to look like a globe.

Earth Balloon, a part of WhereAbouts, Inc, is the brainchild of Barbara Unikel, a former teacher, administrator, and adjunct professor from Chicago. She employs other retired teachers to travel to schools with the balloon and do the presentations.

The balloon has been designed to scale. The size of the continents reflect their true size, unlike older maps with Eurocentric dimensions showing Europe and North America much larger than they are. The seams of the balloon coincide with the lines of longitude. The entry zipper is on the International Dateline.

On the exterior of the balloon, dots mark locations of cities with populations over one million. Inside, the tectonic plates are outlined. The tectonic plates are large chunks of the Earth’s crust, which floats on the mantle. The continents lie atop the plates. Plate movement is responsible for earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and mountain building.

Presentations can be tailored to the age group. Seasons, weather, population centers, water, conservation, tectonic movement, earthquakes, and tsunamis can all be discussed inside the orb.

Asked to share one thing learned in the presentation, fourth grader Rebecca Oberstadt said, “I learned the earth was once one big piece of land [called Pangea].”

“I learned that the desert only gets three inches of water in a year,” offered Hannah Fitzgerald, another fourth grader.

Both girls called the Earth Balloon “awesome.”