Among my obsessions, I love maps and globes. I love geography. I think this is because I also love to travel (even though I haven’t even had a family vacation in years), and sometimes I can even picture different places on a map in my mind. I also associate them with the people I’ve met in those faraway places during my “Walk-a-bout” years.
With that in mind, one of those things that frustrates me beyond words is when people don’t know what I would consider to be basic geography stuff. Having lived in Austria, I often sent letters and packages overseas before the days of near-universal email and Skype. At our large, suburban post office when we lived in the city, the postal workers many times were confused between Austria and Australia, and I often had packages come back to me with “no such address” written on them, after a postal worker put an “Australia” code on the package. I used to write EUROPE in big letters, sometimes highlighting it, and they’d still get confused. Once a postal worker said to me,
“There’s an Australia in Europe? Isn’t it in Africa somewhere?”
I want my kids to have good geography skills because I think it’s good to know the world around us more.
With the spelling curriculum we use (Bob Jones), for fifth grade they include some of the fifty states in each lesson as spelling words, and in sixth grade we have the countries of the world. We used this is a great opportunity to also do some fun geography along with it.
For each spelling pre-test on each and every Monday during those years, I pull out a map, either of the USA or of the World, and have them find their Spelling-List states or countries of the week on the map for extra points. I show them where they are, if they didn’t know already. On Friday, when we do our end of the week spelling test, I again pull out the map. If they can find those countries on the map, they get extra points on their spelling test.
Now that my kids are all out of those grade levels in our homeschool, when they are learning geography or history, I mix those together too, requiring them to be able to spell the country, region, or state correctly, and find it on a map of the world.
Free maps can be found in your grandma’s collection of National Geographic magazines (as long as they have the up-to-date former Soviet countries), and I’ve seen inexpensive ones at Walmart, Target, or Office Depot. Our world map is from the Office Depot clearance table.
Isobel liked this because she felt it’s easier to find Afghanistan than to spell it.
We’re working on it! By the way, our policy always was to keep misspelled words stay on a spelling list in our family until we get them right at least once.
