Field Trips for Home School Geography

Video Transcript

"I'm Jennifer Miller with the Institute for Reality on behalf of Expert Village. Regardless of how you decide to school your children, geography is one of those things that can be very easily woven into family life at home. In fact, it was this extracurricular type of exercise that developed my geographical literacy most efficiently. One of the simple things that we do when ride in the car is give our children maps with the route to grandma's house highlighted on it so that they can follow along as we drive. When they get a little bit older, we had them and atlas that they can highlight themselves. When they get a little bit older, we pass out the state fandex guide that goes through state by state, giving all the pertinent information about the economy and the agriculture, as well as the capital and interesting facts. One o the things that my dad did that was wonderful for my brother and I, was play the game that went something like this: we were driving along in the middle of the desert, nothing to do, and he would yell back into the van, "Quick! Which country is small and south of Paraguay, and separated just slightly by Argentina?" And my brother and I would scramble to be the first one to yell "Uruguay!" Later on he would yell, "Where do the polar bears live?" "In the Arctic." "How do you know?" "Uh...I don't know." And then he would explain to us that the way you know is that the Greek word "arctus" means "bear" and so the polar bears live in the Arctic. "Antarctus" would mean, "against the bear", and so therefore they didn't live in the Antarctic. And so in that way, just driving around, having a good time, we learned a lot of geographical information. One of the fun things that I've taken to doing for our children, and for kids that go with us on various field trips, is to develop guide books for them that are at their own level. I do a little research ahead of time about where we're going to go and what we're going to see. And I download some pictures from the internet, and I make them their own little guide book written at their level, in a way that's conversational and interesting to them about the places that we're going to see and what we're going to do. I include some games and I leave some pages at the end for them to do their journaling. And so in this way, they have a record of what we have done as a family, as well as a link to their geography curriculum and a format that goes very nicely into their portfolio at the end of the year for the state. One of the most precious things that I have is from the year that I was eight and we were traveling around Central America in the van. And that's the journal that my parents insisted that I keep. And it's really fun for my kids to look back through that now, having been to some of those places themselves and see the things that I did when I was a little girl. And so in that way it's become part of our family history, as well as the geography. Another thing that can be done to enhance geographical literacy at home that takes a little more planning but can be a lot of fun, is to have a lifelong geography project. We know one young family that doesn't have any children yet, that is in the process of visiting the geographical center of every state in the United States, trying to determine where they want to live. And they have met some really interesting people as they have moved around from state to state finding the geographical center in someone's backyard. For our family, our lifelong project is to have the children set their feet on all of the seven continents before we emancipate them as eighteen year olds. We've named this "The Adventure Project", and there's even a way that your family can join."