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.

China

Chinese Culture

China (A to Z) by Justine Fontes and Ron Fontes

This book is an encyclopedia of China, describing everything from animals to buildings to cities to dress. The book even includes some Chinese words. Easy to read, beautiful pictures, and wonderful information.

Children of China by Jacqueline Buksh

This chapter book describes life for four children in China. Written from each child's perspective, this story talks about daily routines, family life, things the children learn in school, and things they see around them. Nice descriptions and beautiful dialog.

Chinese Stories

The Pet Dragon by Christoph Niemann

A little girl named Lin has a pet dragon. Together the two cause trouble until one day Lin's father says that the dragon must be put in a cage. The next day, her dragon is missing and searches China to find her dragon. Along the way, we learn some Chinese symbols, which are cleverly incorporated into the art work. Every page introduces two or three new words in a way that is very easy to remember.

Warning: For those of you who are concerned about magic, there is a shaman/witch included in this story. If your religious beliefs are against this, you can avoid this book or you can use it as a means to discuss the topic with your children.

Two of Everything by Lily Toy Hong

This Chinese folktale is about Mr. and Mrs. Haktak, a little old couple who struggle to survive until they find a magic copper pot that duplicates everything they have, including them. Beautiful artwork and a cute story.

Favorite Children's Stories from China & Tibet by Lotta Carswell Hume and Koon-Chiu Lo

A book full of folktales from China, depicting life and customs in a witty and charming manner.

Chinese Food

Visit an authentic Chinese restaurant with someone from China. Let them order for the table and then eat family style.

You can also experience Chinese food at home. We often eat Asian Beef and Broccoli at home. This recipe has been altered to accommodate gluten-free cooking for those who have that problem as I do.

Ingredients

Head of Broccoli, chopped

Thin Beef Steaks, cut into strips

white pepper, to taste

salt, to taste

1 tbsp corn starch

1 tbsp sesame oil

1 tbsp gluten-free soy sauce (or you can skip this if necessary)

1/4 cup beef broth

1 tbsp olive oil

ginger, freshly grated, to taste

garlic, minced, to taste

Rice, cooked

Steps

1. Boil the chopped broccoli for two minutes. Drain and set aside.

2. In a large frying pan, spray with cooking spray and cook the meat at medium high-heat.

3. As you stir the meat, add white pepper and salt to taste.

4. Turn the temperature down, and put the lid on.

5. As the meat browns, stir together the corn starch, sesame oil, and soy-sauce.

6. Pour the sauce and broth into the beef and stir briefly.

7. In a small frying pan, saute the ginger and garlic in the olive oil.

8. When the garlic and ginger is browned (about 1-2 minutes), add it to the meat along with the broccoli.

9. Serve on rice.

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.

Unit Study on Russia

My purpose in these culture lessons is to give the girls a feel for the culture and awareness of the country on the map. We put a large map in our living room, and we reference it with each lesson. The map is large enough (50 x 32) to take up a good part of a the wall above a couch, anything smaller would have been too small.

I started these Russia lessons with a book entitled A Child's Day in a Russian City. In this book, a young girl eats her breakfast of blinis (they're like pancakes) and goes to school. She also visits the market and the library. What I liked most is that this gave the girls a feel for what Russia would be like for a little girl just like them.

And then I have also covered food, art, and language.


Food



I like this book, Cooking the Russian Way. There is a lot of fun recipes, pictures, and cultural information related to food. I used this book for their recipe on blinis (Russian pancakes).


I also got a few recipes from this site: http://www.recipezaar.com/recipes/russian


My absolute favorite dish was the Apricot Lentil Stew. I have never had lentils that tasted so good, partially because it was slightly sweet with dried apricots and cherries added. I served it with Russian Black Bread that we made in our bread maker. The girls did not want to try the stew, but they gobbled up the bread. Tonight I am making this stew again. It was so tasty that I want to have it again, and sometimes kids need to see something a few times before they are willing to try it.


I also want to try Russian Cheese Piroshki (their like cheese dumplings) and Plov (a meat dish over rice, with more dried apricots and cherries).


Art


I liked this book Christmas in Russia , partially for the pictures and partially for the way it helped the girls relate to the people in Russia. We have something in common: we all celebrate Christmas. They build snowmen too. They decorate trees. They sing Christmas songs. However, they don't believe in Santa. Instead, they have Father Frost and the Frost Maiden. The book dedicates two pages to telling the fable of the Frost Maiden, so now the girls get a little of their folk lore.



From our library, we got Russian art books which had many pictures containing statues, architecture, and paintings. Russian architecture is very unique, with the domed roofs. One picture showed a close up of the tiles on the roof, and the interlocking pieces that make these roofs. I gotta say I was very impressed. One caption in the book said that one particular wooden church was made without any nails. How on earth did they do that?





Then we looked through some Chagall paintings. Now that was fun. We took it slow, pointing at all the details. R was the first to notice the violin with the girl's head, and both M & R laughed at the upside down houses and green faces. We read about how he traveled to France and lived in Paris, so our reading took us back to the map to find where France was.




Language

Now we have been learning a lot about Spanish, but I have not really exposed to any other languages other than through the Dora's World Adventure CD, that M plays again and again until we cannot stand it anymore. So, I wanted to expose them to what the language sounded like. Even though I have no intention for them to learn the language, especially since I myself have no ability to teach them, I wanted to dangle something before them see if anything strikes their interest.

So I found this musical introduction to Russian for kids, called Teach Me Russian and also Teach Me Russian and More Russian (this second one is a two pack which includes the original plus some more--so if you order the second one, don't order the first). The music is popular folk songs that our kids already know from our music collection. It included songs like "The more we get together" and "Oh Susanna" and "The Wheels on the Bus." They sing the songs in English and Russian.

I expected M to really like it (she's always crazy about experiencing something new and has shown a lot of interest in different cultures), but M was more interested in the music than the language. She ran to her room where she has her own CD player and put on her kids' music CD to the song "The More We Get Together." She blared it at full volume so the music in the living room and the music in her room could match.

It was R who loved it most. She wanted to listen to the Russian music over and over again, and when it was nap time, she wanted to take it to her room with her. It pleased me to see her enjoy something. She likes school, but other than art projects, she does not show much interest in some of our lessons