Monday 5 August 2013

Day 1 - Geography Curriculum

Good Evening to my fellow Australian friends and good morning to my round the world friends welcome to the Schoolhouse Review Crew 5 days of ... blog hop.

The theme for my 5 days is Curriculum Choices. My aim is not to list every single resource out there (That in itself would be almost impossible as the Internet is an ever changing place). My aim is to give you some ideas to start you off.

Today's theme is Geography

Over the years I have found that this is one area that is mournfully neglected in the home school community.   There are a few ways of teaching this interesting subject after all everything that has ever happened in history happened somewhere in our amazing world!

Incidental Geography 
One way is to do incidental geography. This is done a couple of ways.  One is to have a world map on which you mark the countries you learn about in history or your current read aloud. Sonlight uses this method. Another is to pick a continent and do it the traditional school way which is to start memorising the countries and their capitals. It's all simply a matter of drill work.

Books
There are some really great books to work through here are some I've used

The Geography Puzzle is a fun thing to build and learn the countries and capitals of the world.

Pinterest is one of my favourite Geography resources
Mapping 
  •  Megamaps.  I love this website.  You choose the size (as small as one page or as large as 7 feet accross) and then print on A4 sheets of paper to create the map of your choice.  Best of all it's FREE!
  • Wondermaps from Bright Ideas Press.  Love this.  You add Geography skills to any lesson.  You can chose from historical to modern day maps.
  • Uncle Josh's Outline Map Collection has over 260 printable Maps.
 Curriculum


Expedition Earth

Sir N and I are currently working through Expedition Earth: A Journey through God's World. This curriculum was written by Erica from over at Confessions of a Homeschooler. We have been working our way slowly through this download watching YouTube clips, cooking and extra Notebooking pages. Sir N is enjoying it so much that he calls it our Travel School.


Trail Guide to World Geography


Trail Guide to World Geography  This particular package is my all time favourite.  You can purchase this as a book or an eBook download.  This little big book is chock full.
If you do this book with your children they will have covered geography from A-Z in three years.  You do each section once.  Once in primary school, once in middle school and once in high school. Each time your student does a year they go deeper learn more and practise more.
Each level is a complete 36 week school year course.  The teachers manual comes with everything you need to successfully and comprehensively teach geography without any prior knowledge of the subject.  There are also student work books available for each grade level.

On the www
Milk and Cookies has the most comprehensive collection of Homeschool Geography resources I have seen on the web.

Homeschool giveaways has an excellent resource list of printables too


FREE on the internet


What are some of your favourite resources ?

Tomorrow I will share with you some of my favourite History resources.
Blessings
Chareen

Summer Blog Hop
Be sure to hop on over to the crew blog to read more posts from this series

5 comments:

  1. Thank you for sharing these, Chareen. There's lots of interesting ideas here to browse. Some of our favourite resources are the 10 Days games (each game covers a different continent), travel DVDs and movies, and the Horrible Geography books. I agree with you that linking geography to readings works well. We gone on a lot of rabbit trails by doing that.

    I hope you and your family are well, Chareen.

    God bless:)

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  2. This is a great list - I really like the Global Puzzle and am going to check into getting that for my homeschool. Thanks for posting!

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  3. One of my very favorite resources for Geography is Geography Through Art by Sharon Jeffus and Jamie Aramini.

    Thanks for sharing your list of resources - I found a couple on there that I wasn't familiar with and bookmarked for my reference as I do my lesson planning!

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  4. Love Mega maps:) we've done a few and the children are totally engaged!! where in aust did you get the Global Puzzle? oh and we're using Ann Voskamp's Child's Geo of the World 2nd time around at present. More an earth science than a straight geo mapping. Oh we also have Micheal Palin's travel DVDs.

    I feel like Geography is divided into 3 sections; earth science, culture and mapping. Far more interested in finding mapping resources, the others are easier to come across.

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  5. good list of geography ideas.

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