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Highschool World Geography Questions
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As a family we’ve integrated geography along with our history lessons in the last few years but at the rate we are going my son will not have completed every area of geography before the end of highschool so I’m looking at other options.
I was hoping that maybe some of you moms would have thoughts on the subject.
Here are some of the options I have looked at:
Trail Guide to World Geography
Runkle World Geography
Expedition Earth
PAC World Geography– I found this in the Rainbow Resource Catalog but I can’t find any reviews.
Here’s a link to it:
http://www.pacworks.com/pages/curriculum.html#_geography
and here’s the link to a sample:
http://www.pacworks.com/samples/GEO_CH3_L6.pdf
CBD has a different sample.
A list of living geography books would be wonderful too.
Any comments or suggestions would be appreciated.
I’ve never seen the Trail Guides up close. Runkle is, well, intense. They called it the “Saxon of Geography” when it first came out. It’s big and serious and looks deadly dull to me. I have Expedition Earth to play around with with my younger child for this year; it says it goes up to high school. The book itself is just a page for every country. The lesson plans are supposed to be what makes it “high school”. I’m skeptical I guess, because to me the only high school level content really is “research-it-yourself” projects. I could do that without a curriculum. 🙂 I’ve never seen before the thing you found at Rainbow. We’ve done bunches of things over the years including all the living books you’ll find listed here and places like AO. Have you done Halliburton’s Book of Marvels yet? My junior high kids read that and enjoyed mapping it. We discuss geography a LOT just as we go through our regular studies, hearing things on the news, etc. We also play a lot of games for the basic stuff like what country’s where and what its capital is. I once got a free thing that we really liked that involved a bunch of computer games. I can try to find out where it came from if you want.
Thanks for the reply Bookworm. I don’t have any idea what makes highschool geography highschool level. In the samples I’ve seen there are a lot of terms and the like which we haven’t necessarily covered. What would you do about all the physical geography terms?
We love maps and map drills. We pour over atlases while traveling. We enjoyed mapping the routes of the New World explorers.
I borrowed Halliburton’s Book of Marvels from the library but since I could only get it through inter-library loan for three weeks I barely got to look through it but I liked what I saw. The only problem is that it is not a cheap book to purchase.
What living books from AO would you recommend? I looked at the highschool level books but there were a lot of different ones or would you think the younger level ones would be sufficient?
I’d love to know where you got the computer games.
I think we’ve just done terms as we’ve encountered them in reading. I guess I’m lucky that all my kids have all had fun over the years looking at atlases and stuff, I think we’ve picked up most of it that way.
I didn’t realize that the Book of Marvels has increased in price–we didn’t spend more than $12 or so for ours but that was years ago. I’d send you mine but I have one more kid who hasn’t read it yet!
If there are any books you’ve missed from the younger years those would be a good place to start. I’ve read everything on the AO list except the one on the Year 11 Lite list, I think. They’re all good but I don’t know if there was a specific area you wanted to do. There is a wonderful book called Book Lust to Go by Nancy Pearl that has tons of suggestions for different countries and areas of the world. These are NOT all vetted by homeschool moms to be child-friendly but I’ve read many and researched many, many of the books and could probably help if you had questions about a few of the titles.
Here are some easy online resources I have:
A Map Skills Unit Study from Soli Deo Gloria (available on CurrClick)
Two HLN thematic units, Geography Part I and Geography Part II, that have many useful links and things (also CurrClick)
And a very cool unit called GlobalMania that I got from Terri Johnson, I think for signing up for her mailing list. It has tons of very, very useful game links that my kids all loved. I just checked–it’s still available on her site, knowledgequestmaps.com, go to Catalog and Freebies and you can sign up and get it.
I think I got all of the above items free, although I don’t know if CurrClick still has them for free or not–they might have been promotions that I got them at.
For specific geography term items, try googling “homeschool geography terms”–lots of interesting looking things come up.
Let’s see, let me know if there is still a good area you’d like me to take up. Do you do anything for current events with your kids? We get tons of geography work done with that–I make someone show me where the country being reported about is, then tell me what kind of people live there, sometimes we have little games to see who knows the most. Capital? Currency? Languages spoken? Religion? Terrain and climate?
One REALLY FUN thing we did once for geography–we bought cheap unit lots of world stamps and world coins. I developed a simple page, and then we identified each, filled out a page on each one, made a big notebook–it was so much fun! To be honest, I think it’s possible to get a lot more geography knowledge from stuff like that than from a book!
Bookworm,
Could you tell me your thoughts about AO’s Year 7 Geography book “How the Heather Looks”…I’m thinking about doing that one so I’d love to know your thoughts on it and if you used it, what you did. Thanks so much!
WOW!! I’d love to be a fly on the wall in your house. It really sounds like fun.
I’m going to look into these resources you mentioned.
When it comes to current events and you ask these questions, did you at one time research these areas or do you find out about them at that specific occasion?
Technically we’ve only studied the Middle East in terms of ‘formal’ geography in depth but we’ve done mapping of other areas. So I guess we’re open to almost anything to study.
Thanks for taking the time to pass on all this information. I really appreciate it.
Mrs. K,
I LOVED How the Heather Looks! I probably loved it a little more than my kids did, although they enjoyed it too. This is one I read out loud. If you and your kids have read many of the AO suggestions, you are bound to find this book irresistible. If you have no idea who Ralph Caldecott, Arthur Ransome or Rosemary Sutcliffe are, you might not have so much fun with it. IMO it’s a “don’t miss” but make sure you’ve read your The Wind in the Willows and Swallows and Amazons first!
Teachme2learn, I know some of the answers to those questions myself, just from life. I always loved and have read a lot of geography, travel books, loved geography in school, majored in Global Studies in college . . . so I picked up stuff that way. Except for the world being a vastly different place than it was in 1985. LOL In other words, my kids know a whole lot more about fomer Soviet republics than I do. But we still need to check details sometimes. Best place I know of, even better than Wiki, is the CIA Fact Book, you can find it online. I used this to research my work in college and grad school, actually. Sometimes we argue about something and have to look up the currency of Thailand or something like that online to see who was right. 🙂 (Bhat, I think . . . lol!)
Also consider using travel videos and other fun things like that to learn about areas of the world. The Planet Earth people recently did a series on people and how they live around the world that was fascinating. (Alert–there was one very inappropriate segment that we skipped COMPLETELY and one segment that had tribal women dressed as they usually dress–meaning, not much. Think National Geographic pictures. Parental guidance needed for those two episodes–I can find the exact segment titles for anyone who is interested in the rest of the series. The rest of it was excellent–“living geography” at its best!)
So perhaps you should consider some work on geography terms, some work on identifying places, some current events work, and then reading/looking for other stuff on areas that interest you or your kids. There’s a whole world out there to read about! You can’t possibly “cover” it all but you can get some basics and then go exploring.
There is nothing like the enthusiasm and passion of someone in a subject area to light a fire and inspire another to find out more.
I simply had no concept of what makes up geography. When I was in elementary school we studied countries and that gave me some vague notion of other cultures. When I started teaching my own children I didn’t see the point in spending time teaching them a bunch of facts about a country that they didn’t have any relationship with. Now I see how much we have missed.
Would you be able to recommend a living book to either read aloud or for personal reading to get us started?
Bookworm,
Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts on How the Heather Looks. It looked like it would be really good! Even though we haven’t done much of AO Years 1-6 as a curriculum, we have read quite of few of the listed literature readings. However, The Wind in the Willows and Swallows and Amazons are two we haven’t read yet. I was trying to decide on a read aloud for the next couple of weeks. I think we’ll go ahead and do The Wind in the Willows as I already have a copy of it. 🙂
Do you have any other books from AO Year 7 that you really liked? My daughter read The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood several months ago and loved it. She is now reading about King Arthur and also reading The Princess and the Goblin by Geoge MacDonald. I hadn’t read The Princess and the Goblin so I’m reading it right now too. I am really enjoying it! I was reading it the other day and had to stop but found myself wanting to keep right on reading! 🙂
Mrs. K,
We LOVED Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey. We really liked The Brendan Voyage. Whatever Happened to Penny Candy is a don’t-miss. I’ll look again later, have to run a ds to the orthodontist!
Bookworm,
I was looking to see if my library had the DVDs you recommended and I was wondering if it is the series called the Human Planet by BBC.
And if you would be so kind to share the segments not necessary for viewing?
I had geopgraphy in high school and all we did was label and color maps of the continents. I love dvds because you actaully “see” the things. I enjoyed all the suggestions here because I want it to be more for my girls. =)
teachme2learn,
Yes, the series is The Human Planet. The items to look out for–on Grasslands and Jungles, in the segment on the Korowai tribal group in Papua New Guinea—the women are all topless. We ended up deciding to view parts of this segment ourselves, but my kids are older. It is not prurient or deliberately done, it is just when they show shots with women in them–they have no shirts. The segment is about the Korowai building a new home–in the very tops of some very, very tall trees! It’s a relatively short segment.
In the segment on Deserts, one whole part of the program–on the Wodaabe Flirtation Festival–we skipped the ENTIRE section. It is about a local festival in which couples are encouraged to, um, make friends with someone else. We decided the entire thing was inappropriate and did not watch any of it, but skipped to the next part.
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