Introduction to Geography

The book Me on the Map by Joan Sweeney is a great start to geography for young children. The story shows a girl in her room and then a map of that room, followed by a picture of her house and a map of her house that also contains her room. The story continues to pan out to her street, her town, her state, her country, and then the world. This gives children an understanding of where they are in context of the entire globe.

Another good book for introducing maps is As the Crow Flies: A First Book of Maps by Gail Hartman. I enjoyed this book very much when I read it to my kids. You experience the world from the perspective of different animals, then you study the map of each animal's world, and finally you see how these individual maps are pieced together.

These two books can be followed up with an art lesson where the children draw their own maps of their bedrooms, homes, and neighborhoods. M & R started drawing imaginary maps about how we get to our new house (we don't really have a new house; it was just a story of theirs).

For an introduction to the world atlas, the National Geographic Our World, Updated Edition: A Child's First Picture Atlas by National Geographic Society did an excellent job introducing the continents of the world, giving detailed information about the peoples and the cultures. This is a good one to read again and again. Although it is an easy read, it contains so much information.

Once a child has a basic understanding of geography and the continents, National Geographic World Atlas for Young Explorers, Revised & Expanded Edition by National Geographic is a great resource for digging deeper into the topic of geography. This book packages facts, pictures, and maps in a way that captivates the reader.

I combined these resources with a wall map of the world. We reference this map while reading both fiction and nonfiction whenever the book mentions a country. Also using the wall map as our reference, we conducted unit studies on the people and cultures of each major country, like we did with Russia. Stay tuned to more cultural unit studies.