5 Hands-On Geography Activities

There is more to geography than memorizing states and capitals and studying maps. If you make geography an experience to remember rather than facts and information to recite, you and your child will have a lot more fun along the way.

Explore the world with a compass.
Take a walk around your neighborhood or hike through the park while carrying a compass. Take a compass to the mall or the grocery store. Let your kids carry a compass while they ride in the car. This helps orient a child to their world, making them pay attention to where they are and teaching them how to navigate.

Draw your own maps.
Maps tell you where things are and how to get there. However, maps don’t need to be fancy. As you explore the world with your compass, draw maps of what you see. Draw a map of your house, your neighborhood, your grocery store, or your park.

After drawing a few small maps of your local areas, expand your domain. Look at a real atlas to see how they designate rivers, deserts, and mountains, and then use that as a guide as you build your own world atlas.

You can even have a little fun by drawing maps from stories. Based on the age group of your children, you can build a map for Clifford’s neighborhood, for the barnyard where Charlotte weaves her web, or for the four kids who traveled through Narnia.

Tell stories about your maps.
What happened as you walked around your neighborhood? Tell a story about it as you draw your map. Telling stories builds memory, communication skills, and confidence, so swap some tales as you color.

Add a little imagination and sail the Nile River on a raft. Climb to the top of Mount Everest and have a picnic with a mountain goat. Walk the entire length of the Great Wall of China. What do you see along the way? Who do you talk to?

Write your stories down and compile your maps and stories into a book that you can read again and again. This can be a project that grows over the years.

Experience different cultures.
Russia is the big country in the northeast corner of our world atlas, but what is it like to actually experience Russia? What do the people like? What kind of clothes do they wear? What kind of music do they listen to? Do they dance? Do they sing? What do they eat? How do they work? How do they live?

Answer these questions by eating their foods, wearing their clothes, and listening to their music. Learn some words of their language, and read books about children in that country. Maybe you could even find a pen pal your child can write letters to. Suddenly, you will find Russia is no longer a big orange smear on the map. It has come to life.

Travel.
As a child, I lived in Texas, and most of our extended family was in Wisconsin and Michigan. This means that every year, we had a long road to travel to visit our family. I remember every landmark along the way. I remember the little lazy town where our car broke down, and I remember the excitement over crossing each state border.

As an adult, my husband and I moved out west for a short while. The seven day road trip is memorable, and we still laugh at the South Dakota road signs. I loved driving through the mountains of Minnesota and snapping pictures of the pica that scampered across the road. We drove through Yellowstone and experienced wild bison, and I watched a beautiful green-blue Oregon river turn muddy brown from pollution.

Ask me to fill in those states on the map, and I can now easily list them all. But even more, I remember the terrain and what made each state different than the others.

The wonderful thing about home schooling is that you don’t have to wait for summer to take a vacation. Bring your schoolbooks, pack your paper and pencils, and hit the road.