Geographic literacy is fast becoming one of the most important skills that we can give our children. As technology increases and the world continues to shrink, it becomes more and more important that our children have their map skills in hand and that they're prepared to navigate the cultural differences in language barriers that exist with ease. Unfortunately, the United States continues to lag behind the rest of the world in our geographical literacy. The associated press reported in May of 2006, that of 510 students pulled, one third could not pinpoint Louisiana. Nearly half of them couldn't find Mississippi on a map. Six in 10 couldn't locate Iraq. Forty-seven percent couldn't even find the Indian subcontinent and seventy-five percent of them could not find Israel on the map. These statistics demonstrate the desperate need for us Americans to increase our geographical literacy. Occasional maps in elementary school and one credit of geography in high school is simply not enough for our children to be able to find their neighbors on a map and to feel comfortable navigating the world that we live in. When I was in University, I put off taking the Geography 101 class until my senior year, not because I was afraid that it was going to be to difficult, but because I thought that it was going to be a waste of time. This proved to be right. When I finally got around to taking the class, I used the time to address our wedding invitations, while my friend who sat next to me was taking the class for a second time and was struggling to get a 'C'. One day after class, in frustration, she said "How is it that you can pay no attention at all and still get an 'A'?" I had two answers to that. One was we have been to a lot of the places that we were studying. At that point, we were working on North America. So I had a personal connection to the information. My dad had also played geography games with us in the back of the car and given us maps to color for fun when we were traveling. In that way, little by little, I had acquired a lot of the geography that was taught in this high school level class. While her, with her very standard public school, elementary and high school education was not prepared to pass even the most basic college level geography. This experience bears up what the statistics point out, which Americans continue to fall behind in our geographical literacy, which are a very unnecessary thing and a very easy thing to fix. So, my encouragement to you as a home schooler is that with a little bit of effort and a lot of fun, your family can become very geographically literate. We believe that geography should not be a once a week or once a month subject, but that it should be a once a day subject. It need not be a 20 minute lesson, but even for two, three, or even five minutes your child should be exposed to maps, cultural information, languages and to the great outside world a little bit every day.
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