Geography help, please

The All through the Ages  by Chrisitine Miller resource has a section specifically on Geographical History, where it is broken down into 26 countries with living books broken up into grades 1-3; 4-6; 7-9; 10-12 and overview for each country of ‘specific events’;’bios’;’historical fiction’; and ‘culture’ for each of those grade spans.

Rachel

Miranda,

  if I may offer a simpler solution beyond using another curriculum and much less stressful. If you don’t have wall maps at easy access where the chidlren can see them easily, I suggest that. I know they don’t make the best wallpaper, but having them on our dining room wall exposes my children frequently to both America and the World, practically learning by osmosis!

  For every book we read, barring fantasy reads, they look up where the story takes place and what route the characters take within the story. That’s it. They do it automatically now, rarely do I need to initiate this place-finding expedition. They also do the same regarding current events.

  So, it’s that easy! It seamlessly incorporates itself into history and current events. First, you’ll have to stop and require them to find the places you’re reading about or hearing about on the news, but after a while, they will want to know for themsleves because it will make the story incomplete if they don’t.

  As for learning the cultures of each of these places, most of that will probably come from the books you’re already using. If you want more exposure, then I recommend All Through the Ages mentioned above, for the excellent booklists it has organized for the countries.

  Rachel

We are doing a lot of our geography on a wall map on our dining room wall too, just the same as Rachel.  My husband has sent away for all these free vacation brochures available – and this one company has all these wonderful places to see and it describes them.  He started this for fun (not knowing that I counted it for geogrpahy) by having the kids look all the places on the map.  When they find them, they talk about the pictures and what the people do there.  It really just helps with recognition issues.  They also have 2 uncles who travel around the world for their work, so we look up where they are in relation to us… Of course, we look up current events (Japan, Austrailia, New Zealand, Eygpt, Libya…) and others as things are happening there.  We found a lot of ex-library geography books at our local Friends of the Library sale.  Also, if you google them on line, lots of places have cool things to read and print about the location.  We read “Misty of Chincoteague” and looked it up on line for a map and found a park guide with the vegetation, wildlife, and other fun information.  However!  Look it up before you bring your kids to the computer – one of the beaches in that area was a nude beach (I wasn’t aware of the that prior to this and was glad that we didn’t have to have the whole modesty talk again =) ). 

I had a book about Italy and its food once – it covered all the geograpical regions for food and then had recipes from each region.  Our diet didn’t allow us to eat that, so I gave it away.  There were several in that series though.  It would be a fun way to study. 

I also checked out travel guides and we “walked” our way through the countries, looking at the pictures of the architecture, clothing, transportation, cafes and restuarants.  We even planned “trips” a few times.  Then if we have more interest, we go to the children’ reference section and get more in depth books.  There are also films about countries available at our library.  They enjoyed those.  If you want a “record” of their stuff, the enchanted learning site has little worksheets and books they could print and make about your countries.

This also applies to all 50 states of the US as well.