Resources for Home School Geography

Video Transcript

"I'm Jennifer Miller with the Institute for Reality on behalf of Expert Village. Fortunately, there are lots of resources to allow you to teach geography at home. The internet is just a wealth of wonderful resources. You can go online and download information about any country in the world. You can download maps, you can get all sorts of lesson plans that are pre-made and ready to go. Some of our favorite resources come from one of our sponsors of the Edventure Project, which is "Geography Matters". So I'm going to share a few of those with you today, just because I think that they're some of the best that are available. The first thing that is just indispensable is "Uncle Josh's Outline Map" book. And this comes in book format or on CD-ROM. I prefer it on CD-ROM because it allows me to print out the maps I need on any given day, just with the click of a button. The maps are extremely well done and very user friendly and easy for homeschoolers to adapt, no matter what kind of geography curriculum you're using. Another thing that Geography Matters produces is called "Visual Manna's Teaching Geography Through Art". And if you're interested in weaving geography throughout all areas of your curriculum, art is a wonderful way to do that because it provides a natural link, also, to history. And using this book, you can by country by country, culture by culture, find art projects that will correspond to the geography that you're already teaching. So this one is wonderful for all ages, regardless of the curriculum that you're using. This year, the world geography notebooks that our children are all creating from our kindergartener right through our high schooler, are based on Geography Matters' Trail Guide to World Geography. And this is a great resource, especially for large families who are teaching more than one child at a time, because it has activities on a given topic that are designed specifically for each age level. So your whole family can be studying, say, North America together. Your little ones can be doing certain activities. Your older ones can be doing things that are more in-depth, allowing you to have a very family-centered approach. And to make this even easier, they produce on CD-ROM, the actual notebook that all you have to do is print it right out and you have everything prepared at your fingertips: the maps, the activities, the questions and the answers are conveniently located in the back of the book for the parent who is still developing their geographical literacy. Another resource that Geography Matters produces that is indispensable, it's called the Ultimate Geography and Timeline Guide. And this book is really everything that you need to use as a spine for your geography curriculum, kindergarten through twelfth grade. It's not going to be the only thing you use, but it will be something you use regularly and will provide you a good starting point. If you use this as the basis of your geography curriculum, you're not going to have any major gaps, and your children are going to be highly geographically literate by the time you're done with it. It provides activities and unit studies and mapping skills, as well as definitions and flash cards for the main geographical terms, as well as lists of things that ought to be memorized, to help any parent be able to develop the geographical literacy of their family. There are several good atlases on the market. Geography Matters has different recommendations for different levels. The one that our family uses is the Answer Atlas, which is the one that they recommended for high school level work. Our middle school children are using it also, with equal success. It's an excellent beginning atlas, because it's not overkill in its information, and yet it has everything that you're going to need in terms of statistics, country information, political maps, terrain maps in a very easy to use format. It's an excellent resource for children who are beginning to use atlases and who are beginning to delve a little deeper than just their basic map skills for their geography."