The five themes of geography were developed by the National Geographic Society in order for teachers to organize geographic concepts for instruction. The themes are place, location, region, movement, and human-environment interaction.
www.nationalgeographic.com/resources/ngo/education/themes.html
 
 
 

The following resources provide ideas, lessons, and explanations on the five themes:
www.education-world.com/a_lesson/lesson071.htm
This lesson planning articles provides 25 activities related to teaching geography using the five themes.

www2.una.edu/geography/statedepted/themes.html
Great website for providing questions for each of the five themes as well as explanatory information. 

www.davis.K12.ut.us/etc./5themes/INDEX.htm
A Corel 7 presentation for ninth graders on the five themes developed by Kathy Evans. 
 
 

Activities to integrate the five themes with the Himalayas:
 

1) View the film Bhutan: the Last Shangri-La from the PBS Series on the Living Edens.  (www.pbs.org/edens/bhutan/Bhu_people.htm  for activities to download on the film.) 
The film highlights the natural history of this Himalayan country within the context of a Tibetan Buddhist legend of the interdependence of animals.  There is some discussion of human-environment interaction as Buddhist beliefs support a reverence for life.

For other sites on Bhutan, check out www.cia.gov/publications/factbook/goes/bt.html for maps, absolute location, background, and other information on the economy, people, government, military, communications and transnational issues.

More information is available through the search engine from the Library of Congress: www.loc.gov
 

2)  View the film Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladak and from the Annenburg Film Collection Continent on the Move the film on migration.  Both films discuss the migration of people to the cities: compare and contrast the reactions of people to their dilemma—to stay in their communities or to move to the cities to find work.  The theme is movement.
 

Assessment Activity: 

To understand whether the students understand the five themes, they can research  three regions of the world, using a matrix.  Place the three regions of the world along the horizonal axis; place the four themes on the left hand side: place, abolute locations; movement of people and ideas(notable migrations, changes in religious and cultural ideas); and human-environment interactions ( the role of technology, architecture, engineering, agriculture, forestation, population density, etc.). 

A variant on the activity would be for the teacher to supply information for column one on the first region (to create a model for students to follow) and then for the subsequent regions, each student researches one region.  The students will pair up and complete their matrices with the information from one other student.