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Geography for 1st grade?
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I have been loosely using Beginning Geography by Evan-Moor but I’m really not liking it. The drawings/pictures seem to be at 1st grade level which catches my son’s attention but it expects the student to be able to read the complicated names of animals and various locations as an early reader. Way too teacher intensive. I dont know if I’m just being too sensitive, but does anyone have the same complaint? What’s out there for teaching simple geography that keeps an active little boy’s attention?
I’m not familiar with the resource you’re talking about, but I can tell you (loosely) what Charlotte Mason did with little ones. She recommended taking them outside and just talking about geography, starting with what’s on your own street. Learn how to tell direction and then challenge your child to go on a scavenger hunt, using direction as his only way to find the treasure (ie. walk out the front door and go north. Turn west on Cherry Street, etc.).
There is also a great little book called Me on the Map that helps children understand what geography is, starting with their room, then moving outward to their street, town, state, country, and finally, world. After reading that book, challenge your child to make a map of his room or your house. Mine also really love looking at the globe and finding places they’ve never found before and then looking those places up on the Internet or in a book like Hungry Planet or Material World.
If you have friends or family that live out of state or in other countries, you can help your son find those locations on a globe or world map, and then trace the route to their state from your town or state.
You can talk about various ecosystems in the context of geography. Find a desert, such as the Sahara, point it out on a map and where it is in relation to where you live, then talk about the climate of the desert, the animals that live there, how people find water, etc. Then find a mountainous region and do the same thing, and discuss the differences between the two geographical regions. That’s science and geography combined!
You can teach your son about mountains, plateaus, cliffs, canyons, rivers, lakes, oceans, and more, using just living books. The Bears on Hemlock Mountain is a book that just popped into my mind that would be perfect for your son’s age.
I also taught my 7yos the continents and four major oceans using map studies and map drills. If your son isn’t able to write, you can have a color key for him to identify the continent. For example, color North America red, color South America green, color Asia purple, etc. Add a continent or ocean at the end of the week and keep it going until you’ve covered all of them.
Hope that helps! Geography is so much fun. Map study and map drill are my children’s favorite things to do, and they’re now 10 and almost 9!
Blessings,
Lindsey
I love all the ideas on Lindsey’s post above; for grade one these ideas just about perfect!
If, for whatever reason, you do still want a program contained within a book (but a book less dry than the Evan-Moor you cited above), you might consider Galloping the Globe (Pettit & Mullins), or A Child’s Geography (Voskamp).
Another fun, learning book (along the lines of the Me on the Map that Lindsey mentioned above) is by Scot Ritchie and it’s called Follow That Map! This one would also be perfect for first grade.
Not sure if you have this but one thing that my kids love to do when we
re in the car is to follow the gadget at the top of the windshield that indicates our direction (I wish I knew the real name of it <img src="/scmforum/my-plugins/tiny_mce/plugins/emotions/img/smiley-embarassed.gif" border="0" alt="Embarassed" title="Embarassed" /> ). They truly learned their North, South, East and West just from watching this little screen in my van! I suppose, if your vehicle doesnt have this, using a compass would be just as easy (and probably more fun!).Once they learned the concept of direction, we stood on our own property and told them what direction the house was facing and we pointed to where the sun came up in the east. Suddenly, a lightbulb went off for them! After we did this they were forever talking about direction while out playing….i.e. hey, did you hear that train whistle…sounded like it was coming from the west! Do you see that crow…look, look, it
s heading south! Its a real joy now for me to witness this. And my almost 11 and 9 year old boys just taught this to my younger children.Have fun with it. Blessings, Angie
PS – sorry for the strange punctuation on this post and lack of quotation marks; for some reason my french keyboard features are turned on at the moment…
Oh, my, that post really is strange looking — so sorry, but hope the ideas are there for you anyway!
Lindsey, thank you so much for those suggestions. I have already purchased the Holling books and Module 6 for just the geography lessons, but I want to incorporate some of your ideas, too. I like the idea of the colored continents. I was wondering how I was going to pull of map drill with a first grader. LOL! I hadn’t gotten that far in planning, but that solved a dilemma for me. I have Uncle Josh’s CD and the maps from Beautiful Feet. Sounds like the beginnings to a fun geography day for us. 🙂
Can anyone recommend a geography atlas suitable for first grade? (or a kind suggestion that it isn’t necessary…LOL!)
My first grader and I have been reading through the ____ Twins books on my tablet. Each one is a fictional story about a set of twin children and immerses you in the culture. So far we read the Eskimo Twins, The Japanese Twins, and now are reading the Scotch Twins. We both love the stories and are learning a lot in a fun way. On occasion we will do an internet/youtube search to get more info. For example, in today’s reading of the Scotch Twins they mentioned a Scottish song so I did a youtube search and we found a bagpipe video. We recognized the song as what we heard bagpipes playing during my DH’s 5k race a month ago! I like that we are just reading a book and it’s easy. I like easy!
That being said, DS already knows oceans, continents and many countries. We just talk about them casually as it comes up. My 4yo also knows several countries from having a world map placemat at her spot at the table.
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