Combining Home School Geography With Other Subjects

Video Transcript

"I'm Jennifer Miller with the Institute for Reality, on behalf of Expert Village. Let's talk for a minute about how to weave geography throughout your whole curriculum. If you do it right, geography should flow seamlessly into many of your other subjects. It's most natural allies are history, art, literature, music, and foreign language. So let's start with history. History is the study of places, people and cultures, and what happened in them. In that way, it's very similar to geography and very easy to link the two. In addition to making your timelines, which everyone does for history, you could also make historical maps. If you're studying World War II, for instance, you could make a map that showed the movements of the Allied troops. If you're studying the Middle Ages, you could make a map that showed the routes the Crusaders took on their way to Israel. If you're studying the Renaissance, and explorer's map would be obvious. Or maybe a map of the progress that the Moors made as they moved on into Europe. What is the point of knowing anything about the Napoleonic War, if you don't know where it happened? How can you understand the extent of the Roman Empire, if you don't have some concept of where Hadrian's Wall lies? So as you can see, geography and history are inextricably linked, and it takes very little effort to draw out the geography from within the history. Now let's look at art. Art flows very naturally out of culture, which is one of the three major themes of studying geography. The geographical differences in Renaissance Art are fascinating, if you take the time to look at them. Art is also linked to history. If you're studying Alaska and northern Canada, and you're studying the Inuit people and their history, it's very simple to also draw out their art related to their geography and try scrimshawing on some whale bone. Or on a white plastic milk jug, if that's all you have. It's also very easy to link geography to literature. Every book that you read takes place somewhere. If you're reading about Joan of Arc, mark France on the map. If you?re reading Don Quixote, mark Spain. If you're reading Tolstoy, how about Russia? A book's setting is not the only aspect that can be drawn into geography. An author is also geographically bound. It makes and interesting study to also look at how the political climate of his geographical location affects who he is and how he writes. Also there might be a religious influence that might be linked to culture, which is another aspect in the study of geography. There might be cultural influences on the author that would be personal to him that would relate to the study of the people that he writes about. All these things together make for good high school level geographical analysis of persons, places, and cultures. Now let's look at music. Music comes from somewhere. Each place has music that's unique to its own area that has developed out of the history of the people and the places and the cultures that have developed in that part of the world. Are you studying Africa? Get a book or a video and learn how to do some djembe drumming. Or, you might decide, with older students, to study the geographical origins of jazz. The other thing that you can do is to attend performances that are going to be specifically linked to geography. Recently our family attended a performance by African Children's Choir. And in that one hour performance, they not only were exposed to some wonderful music, but they also got a history lesson, they also got map skills, and lots of introduction to cultures that they wouldn't otherwise have been exposed to. Foreign language is an obvious link. Every place in the world has a language that's spoken there, and many of those places, it's not English. So one that you can link your study of geography to your study of foreign language, to your study of history and literature, is to learn a few phrases of the languages that are being spoken in the places that you're studying or the books that you're reading. You should choose one or two languages to become functionally literate in as a family. For our family, we've chosen French and Spanish for that. As you begin to learn a foreign language, it's almost impossible not to become familiar, also, with the people and the places, and the culture from which that language originates."