Recently I saw a meme floating around that just about made me cry. I won’t post it here, but suffice it to say there are some people in the world who can’t keep condiments and continents straight.
Folks, this just should not be.
After I got my shoulders down from around my ears and managed to unclench my jaw, I grabbed the nearest child– who happened to be 3 year-old Birdie– and demanded, “Name the continents.” After dutifully recounting “Norf America, Souf America, U-rop, Asia, and Ausssstrail-yuh! Africa! Ant-arc-tick-uh! These are the continents!” in her delightful sing-song voice, she then gave me the run down of the oceans. I then dragged her sweet little self over to our massive wall map and had her sing the song again, this time pointing to the appropriate land masses.
Because I needed to be reminded that while I may be messing up in six million ways every single day, my kids are not going to end up with their adorable visages plastered on the internet as the poster children for geography ignorance.
Personally, I blame the mainstream “ripple effect” social studies system for the profound lack of knowledge most folks have about the world. While you may not realize that it’s an actual method, you’ll no doubt recognize this progression of awareness as the norm: self, neighborhood, town, county, state, country, world. The idea behind this is that young children are very ego-centric, and can more easily grasp the concept of self than the idea of massive chunks of land full of countless other human beings.
I haven’t found this to be true. Quite the opposite. My children have had no problem learning about Australia and still maintaining that they are the single most important people God ever created. They’ve all known their way around a map before the kindergarten year has dawned, and by and large, they’ve been able to grasp little bits of earth trivia– like the fact that the only Giant Pandas you’ll find in North America live in zoos.
How has this monumental task been accomplished? Surely it’s a tall order that requires special curriculum, lots of time, and a personal knowledge of every country in the world. Except, it doesn’t. Teaching your kids geography is fun, easy, and (for the most part) free.
So what do we, personally, do to produce geo-literate kids in the preschool years?
We use maps. A lot of maps. I’ve posted before about the fact that the highlight of our school/game space is a huge world map. It’s a point of reference for everything from where the mountain Diego was climbing was supposedly located, to where relatives live, to where the soccer team we’re discussing calls home. We reference the map often (think: daily) and the kids learn their way around at an early age. I always point out our home town, and we make fabulous finger airplane rides from exotic locations back to our home base.
In addition to the big map, I routinely print out black line maps from the web. These can be local maps, state maps, world maps … whatever is called for. Coloring and decorating the maps is big fun, it turns out. These can also be used in tandem with our favorite Montessori-style iPad app for geography learning. Rantek, Inc.’s Mobile Montessori World Continents does a wonderful three-part lesson and offers fun puzzles and other interactive learning avenues. One activity that John Mark and Birdie ask for again and again is using the app to color in a blank map. They’ll spend a chunk of a morning matching colors to the continents and finding them on their own maps.
Aside from just coloring, we use “blob mapping.” The idea here at this level isn’t to create perfect representations of land masses. It’s to learn approximate positions and shapes. I had no idea that this was a Classical Conversations cornerstone until I read this blog post and realized that there’s an actual process people use in developing this skill further. Now that I know, I just might employ those freebie printables to help my kiddos along.
We also sing a lot of geography. If you’re a homeschooler, you recognized Birdie’s continent sing-a-long from Audio Memory’s Geography Songs. I admit that I still sing my way through Eastern Europe. Hey– it works! Bonus points for singing and locating the areas on a map, but at this stage, even just getting the names of the countries in their heads is golden, right?
Another Montessori-inspired addition to our geography education is the use of nomenclature cards. I use these quite regularly as matching games in the early years, then slowly build up to actual reading as the child’s level advances. The ones you see in use here are freebies from The Helpful Garden. If you’re not sure how to use these 3-part cards, check out this great youtube tutorial.
Notice how there’s no formal “curriculum” here? Even the cards are “presented” to my littles as a game, an activity that they actually ask for rather than being assigned. My littles think that geography is a fun pursuit, a neat adventure. They’re learning, sure. But as far as they’re concerned, they are coloring, solving puzzles, and playing detective. That’s how I want the world to be to my children: available and amazing. And the only way they come to that conclusion, friends, is by knowing the difference between Africa and pickle relish.
The best thing I ever did for geography was to buy large laminated maps, one of the world and one of the US, and hang them in my hallway. Whenever we hear about a place on a movie or in a book, we look it up on the map. The kids use the maps to play games, sometimes I’ll just find a child memorizing the names of all the “pink” countries. We do very little formal geography, but i amazed at how much they know.