Elementary Level Home School Geography

Video Transcript

"The middle years are comprised of approximately fourth through eighth grade. At this age there is quite a range of what a child is capable of in terms of developing geographical literacy. If you are diligent in educating your child every day a little bit in geography you will be amazed at just how much they can retain during these four years. Regardless of what curriculum you are using, this is the perfect age to develop note booking skills for children, and geography is the perfect subject in which to employ notebooks. These can take on lots of different forms and they might be slightly different every single year. You could spend the year studying the geographical landforms and note booking about that. You could spend a year working on a cultural notebook and another year on developing a political maps notebook. You could do one focused on economies or do one continent every semester and in that way develop a very in depth world notebook. You can develop a world notebook based on the major countries on each continent as we do in year five. You could do a states notebook one year like we do in year four. The possibilities are endless. Note booking is one of those things that can be based on a child's interest and can develop into quite an interesting experience for a child. At this age, your child's interests should definitely be woven into geography and into what he is learning about the world. If your child has a bent towards art, then he should include the art of the various cultures and peoples that he studies into his geography notebook. If your child is musically inclined, maybe he can collect recordings of indigenous peoples or recordings of the classical music of various cultures and include those sound files into his geography notebook online, instead of on a paper version. Help your child to form relationships with the people, the places, and the cultures that he is studying through the development of notebooks. Another way for them to notebook and to form personal relationships as Charlotte Mason suggested with the information at hand and with the countries at hand is through recording their own travels. One way to do this is by journaling. Everywhere our kids go they are required to keep journals that tell about where they have been and what they have seen while they are there and the new things that they have learned. Another family that we know of assigns their children projects everywhere they go. One child might be instructed to photograph the doors of churches as you travel across the country. Another little child we know was instructed to photograph the scat of animals as they went across the country and include that in his geography notebook. So you can take the interest of your child no matter how bizarre and work them into their geographical literacy development. At this age, students should be memorizing in great deal and nobody likes to talk about memorizing things because it is not seen as being very much fun, but at this middle childhood stage, there is so much that they are capable of memorizing and they should be memorizing. They really need to learn to memorize if they are going to be truly geographically literate. These things include the obvious, the states and the capitals, the major countries on each continent, rivers, oceans, the various lines of longitude and latitude that matter, such as the equator, the prime meridian, the arctic circle, the tropics of cancer and Capricorn. They should be stewing map work every single week so that they become familiar with the rest of the world as they are with their own neighborhood."