If 18 standards and six sub-categories seem like a little much and a bit complicated way to teach geography to you, then there is a much simpler way to think about it that will also set your feet on the right path. In its most basic form, geography is about places, people and cultures. That's it, so if you focus on thinking about geography as the study of places, people and cultures, you will quickly be able to find ways to integrate it into all areas of your curriculum. The study of places includes map skills, geology, terrain maps, and political maps, learning the rivers and mountain ranges, states, capitals and much, much more. The study of people would include current events, race and ethnicity, population, migration and density, historical persons, such as monarchs, scientists, or adventurers, events, wars and crusades, native populations. Then there are current adventures that are going on, such as World Cup Races or following the life of the oldest man to swim the English Channel. In studying culture there is some overlap in what we study with people because cultures are made up of collections of peoples. One of the things that can be studied is cultural development, as a result of geographical surroundings, such as people who live in deserts, on islands. When you are studying culture, you are also going to look at other things like art, music, religion, and daily living. So you can see in thinking geography, just in the simple terms of places, people, and culture, that if you brainstorm on those three topics alone, you can very quickly come up with a lot of ways to integrate geography into every aspect of your curriculum. As we said earlier, we believe that geography should be an every day subject and not something that turns up once in a while in a child's education. The reason for this is that geography relates in some way to what's going on in our children's formal educations every day. All that is necessary for us to incorporate geography on a daily basis as parents is to begin to be aware of what geography is in the study of places, people, and cultures and to begin to look for ways that it shows up in every day life and then work that into what we are already teaching. In this way our children not only grow in geographical literacy, they also make real connections with why geography is important to their every day life in the future as well as right now. We agree with Charlotte Mason that the essence of education is forming personal relationships with the great ideas of all time. We encourage children to form relationships with the people, the places and the cultures that are around them as well as those that are in the larger world. In this way they build cultural literacy a little bit at a time and they become comfortable living in the great big world. In the next three segments, we are going to go stage by stage, and help you to see what kinds of things you can do to encourage geographical literacy in the early elementary years, in the middle elementary years and then again in high school.
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