Geography, geography and more geography!

We ended up spending our entire school day on geography today.  My boys just love geography and each year we participate in a geography fair with our homeschool group.



The boys can pick anywhere in the entire world to research and often have such a great time learning.

We like to keep geography learning as hands on as possible.  Here are some of ideas and activities we use when studying geography:


  • we read books
  • watch movies about the region
  • have fun trying out new recipes
  • we find craft projects that go with the region like making art, lanterns, paper boats and masks
  • we try building mini replicas of their houses
  • color in maps and flags
  • make cookie, salt or brownie dough maps
  • pretend play about that region; acting out chores, using toy animals from the region, putting on a skit
  • play geography board games and computer games  
  • listen to music from the region and try out new instruments
  • play games that children from that region would play
  • try writing in their language
  • put together puzzles about various regions 


Our geography fair is a wonderful excuse to squeeze in some extra geography.

The boys wanted to start working on their geography fair projects.

Ian has many books about Guyana but he needed help reading and comprehending what he was reading.  Honestly, I think he just looks at the sheer amount of words on each page and gives up!

  • We read a chapter in one of his books and wrote up one full page of facts about Guyana.  
  • We printed out a map of Guyana and a blank flag for him to color in by himself.   
  • We picked out a few recipes we'd like to try and make.  
  • He also picked out a rubber stamp of an excavator to use at our geography fair (since Guyana has a lot of mining and equipment).  


 As part of our geography fair we all provide a snack, a craft project and a stamp or a picture to put into all the kids passports and I'm pretty impressed that by the end of day 1 Ian has most of that covered already!

We haven't even signed up for our geography fair yet since it isn't until the end of April, but I love that they are all anxious to get started! 


Alec he is reading all the books about Japan that we checked out of the library last week because he is genuinely interested in Japan.  Though he wants his geography fair report to be about the fictional land of Pokemon we thought it would be neat to read about the country where Pokemon originated.

He wanted to try and practice a few of the Japanese letters/ characters today for school!



He also read a huge article on the world of Pokémon and started planning what he wants to tell people about the 6 different regions.  I have warned him repeatedly that I won't be able to help him much and that this report is about geography so his report can't be about all the different Pokémon animals but should be about where they live.  He's ready to take on this challenge and I'm anxious to see what he comes up with on his own.

It has taken Evan until today to decide on what he wants to study for our geography and history fair.   After studying the map for a bit he told me he wanted to learn about Madagascar (a country I didn't even mention to him wen trying to find suggestions!).

He pointed it out to me and told me he knows he likes Madagascar because lemurs live there.

Today we worked together to make a flag of Madagascar and we printed a map of Madagascar off of the computer.

Rather than print a flag off of the computer to color we put one together using construction paper.  The white band should have been a bit wider but I do make some concessions for age. 


The boys then settled down to eat lunch and ended up watching a LOT of geography movies.  They watched Families of Japan, Families of Australia, and Families of India.

We had to stop the movie about Japan a few times as Alec elaborated on what they were showing us and telling us about the books he read last night.  He was sent to bed early last night and ended up reading four books before bed; two of which were chapter books! 


The boys spent the afternoon reading, playing outside and finishing up our jigsaw puzzle.


While we certainly don't cover geography lessons each day; I find that when we do decide to study a region my boys like to completely immerse themselves! 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Share Our Lives: 5 Items I Can't Live Without

Prime Purchases in February 2023

Let's Look At... Our Grocery haul