My almost nine year old recently requested to do some more formal geography and I've been looking for something ever since. My husband has been doing a lot of informal geography with the kids and quite successfully. I used to be the somewhat geographically challenged one in the family, but I've picked some things by osmosis over the years and I really hope that my children will avoid such fate by learning these things painlessly bit by bit when they are young. Meanwhile, I am enjoying learning with them, another great benefit of learning with one's children, one gets to rectify one's own educational weak spots. We have a big map of the world hanging on the wall of our main living area, with the flags of all the different countries on the bottom. The map sees regular use as my dh is a great lover of both geography and history, so he often takes them to the map to explain something. But I figured, it can't hurt to throw something slightly more formal in, especially as it can involve copywork, history or art too. So here are a few wonderful links I discovered while looking to put together a diy geography curriculum for us.
Here is a link to a great post explaining the mechanics of creating your own short and sweet geography drills
Here are many free printable outline maps with and without labels for coloring or labeling, also more outline map links here for the aforementioned drills.
Enchanted Learning has a ton of geography printables here for about $20 a year. I am still contemplating whether it's worth it for me to sign up. I like their map coloring activities.
And here is a link to Charlotte Mason's Elementary Geography and here is another CMlike book called Home Geography for Primary Grades by C.C. Long Ph.D.from Project Gutenberg with lots of great information, lovely old-fashioned illustrations and sweet poems, split into short and to the point lessons.
And here is a really exciting looking curriculum from Ellen McHenry that combines history, geography and art for a slightly older age group.
So this should give us a place to start or rather to continue with our geographical learning adventures.
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Wow! Thank you for all these wonderful links!
ReplyDeleteJust to let you know, I downloaded CM's Elementary Geography with pictures from Scribd. I don't love the font, but the poster is clearly Jewish as she has also hyphenated the word G-d.
You can try your luck with the link here:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/19753296/Geography-Book-by-Charlotte-Mason
I printed & hole-punched this one at Kinko's. It wasn't cheap, but now I have it in a binder and we curl up with it, plus our globe, every few days or so.
(p.s. As usual, you read my mind, and I was just looking at Mapping the World With Art earlier today!) (my kids are a bit young, though...)
p.s. I blogged about Enchanted Learning the other day. I wouldn't rave and say it's the best $20 I ever spent, but I have been surprised and pleased a couple of times so far since I paid in February.
ReplyDeletehttp://ronypony.blogspot.com/2011/05/another-shameful-homeschool-purchase.html