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A year of Geography!
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I started planning for next school year last week and I am so looking forward to it. We are going to do a full year of countries and cultures using using all 6 of the Visits To…geography guides. My kids will be 3rd grade and 1st grade with a toddler and newborn in the mix. We will focus on people and life more so than the actual map work. (We will do map work but my goal is for them to fall in love with other people, not to know where ever country is located)
That sounds like fun. The book Give your child the world by Jamie Martin has lots of book ideas in it for novels. If you want more ideas.
I am so excited to hear about this! I was actually just thinking about doing this for next year, as I have all six of the geography guides and we love reading stories about and from cultures other than American. I’m excited to hear if others have ideas about this, too!
I have one daughter (well, one left HSing) and she’ll be in 3rd grade next year, too.
We are going to add in folk tales and fairytales from the regions and ideally cook food or go to local festivals when they come up. I’m so excited just to read books and learn about other people.
We did a countries and cultures year a few years back. It was so much fun! A great starting place for book lists is this post on Our Journey Westward: http://www.ourjourneywestward.com/geography-living-literature/
Some of my favorite books for ‘spines’ were-
DK books: Children Just Like Me, Children Just Like Me: Celebrations, A Life Like Mine, A School Like Mine.
We also used Material World, Hungry Planet, and Man Eating Bugs but they may work better for older ages than you have. Also, the Man Eating Bugs has 1 or 2 pictures I remember adding shorts for a bit of modesty 😉
Kayla,
How are you planning this? I’m interested but unsure of the details. Which books? How many times a week?
I was reviewing the Visits to.. series and they are designed for 36 weeks so how are you fitting 6 into 1 year? I know you mentioned light map work too.
Please share if you don’t mind. Oh, do you like the book Give Your Child…?
So I am still working through this. So far since my kids are only year 1 and year 3 (plus a toddler and will be new born) I’m not really concerned about their map skills. So we will have a map we label but probably just the same map until it’s filled, not anew one each time new countries are introduced. We are also going to skip the detailed map work. So that frees up about 4-5 lessons out of 36 just by skipping the detail maps. We will label maps once a week instead of daily. I plan to just read aloud daily, 5 days a week, and map one day.
I have added in a ton of books from Give your child the world, and if we get to them we do and if we don’t I’ll put them in the free read basket. The actual Visits to guides have about 6-7 Material world and hingry planet reads, and 5-6 picture books to read. So I figure that won’t be hard to do in 6-7 weeks for each guide. I’ll plan on 2 days for each picture book, more for ones that the guide has spaced out anyway. And then add in a few from give your child the world on countries that aren’t highlighted in the guide.
You have to remember we are not doing a history guide next year so this will take the place of that. So 1-2 readings every day is the norm for us. We are so excited. A friend of mine did it this year and we purchased all the books from her.
Also, we usually scho year around, 4 days a week. Giving us about 42-45 weeks of school. Because I am having the baby and plan to do “lite” school from October through December we are going to do school 5 days a week for the same number of weeks, 42-45 (basically until we are done) so that gives me a lot of time, and reading aloud is easy when nursing 🙂
A great idea. I have thought of doing it myself. I think I will do it in segments during the summers. Give Your Child the World is a fabulous book. My older teens have begun traveling for missions and with other organizations such as Patriot Academy. I am glad that through CM ideals my children have known about the geography and people of the world from an early age. The other side of the world seems very familiar and realistic to them. They are not intimidated to see and experience these places and peoples. I hope this encourages us all to continue showing the world to our children.
We did this this past school year for kindergarten, and it has been great! We read lots of great books that we may never have read otherwise, ate great food, and did fun activities too. Even when we kind of slacked and didn’t do everything planned, I still am amazed how much my daughter has learned about people all over the world, and I love how she gets so excited when she makes connections with things she hears or sees to countries we’ve studied! I put a lot of work and time into our curriculum and I’m very proud of it, so I have decided to compile it into an ebook and maybe try to start selling it. I should have it done this summer so if anyone is interested… 🙂 But if you are wondering about any of the books for the different countries, or are stuck for what to do for anything, maybe I can help! We’ve done a lot and read a lot (thank you library!) Anyways, I think doing this was a great foundation for all future studies so I get super excited when other people are doing the same thing!
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