Never has it been more important to remind our students of the larger world that exists beyond their community. It’s not just your family that is affected by coronavirus. Coronavirus is impacting people around the world. Last week, I quoted Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot speech in this post. I find his words a powerful reminder that we are more than just our neighborhood, our city, our state, or even our country. As USA for Africa sang 35 years ago, “We Are The World”.
While homeschooling our kids, I’ve tried to instill a sense of the world beyond our community. We learn about other cultures in history. But, for the most part, what we cover in history is not current. It’s not now. Not today. History is stories from the past that often don’t feel ‘real’. Given the opportunity, I would love to have our family travel the world and see first-hand the evidence that these stories are real and that they actually occurred. Wouldn’t you?
Since world travel is not an option for most, I want to share a simple tool that I found helpful in creating an awareness of the world around us. It’s very accessible for young children and fun to occasionally use with older students as well. For lack of a better name, I call them Geography Sheets. I came up with them about 12 years ago when my children were all very young.
I’ve included some photos of the sheets we used. They’re easy to make. Just decide what info you want to cover, print them out, laminate with self stick laminating paper, and have your kids fill them out using erasable markers. Dry erase markers are easy, but the wet erase ones are better when smudging is a problem.
Filling these out gives kids a real sense that, while the sun is shining here, it’s pouring down rain in Uruguay. That while they’re eating breakfast, kids in Shanghai have finished their day and are asleep in bed. Or that when they’re eating dinner, people in Sydney, Australia are starting tomorrow’s workday.
You can have them focus on a particular geographical area or randomly cover the whole world. When we studied our state, we focused on doing Colorado locations for almost a month. When we did a unit on the Middle East, we covered that. We’ve also randomly picked places around the world. Good ways to do this are drawing slips of paper that list countries and their capitals from a jar or use a dartboard or blindfold approach to pinpointing a new location each day.
Along with the location, you can put any information you want on these sheets. Some options are time, weather, sunrise and sunset, language spoken, dominant religions, leaders, etc. If you have several kids, you can have them each do a different kind of sheet for the same location. For very young children, you can write out the longer location names and have them fill in the easier items like time or temperature. All of the info your kids need to complete the sheets is easily accessed online.
Beyond learning geography, these sheets spur questions and provide opportunities for exploration in your studies. Questions arise like, “What does Mongolia look like? Is it all desert? What do people do there?”
I love these tangents in homeschooling! I think some of the paths we’ve wandered down have provided some of our most notable learning experiences, particularly in history.
We were recently doing an overview of ancient civilizations around the Mediterranean, which led us from Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Greek, and others to the Indus Valley Civilization – a group of people larger than both the Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations. Who knew? This led to a wonderful Ted–Ed talk about lost languages and the processes people use to try and decipher them. And see, now I’ve gone off on a tangent about the people of the Indus Valley.
Back to the Geography sheets. Use them or use something like them. Explore beyond your community in all the ways you can. Establish an understanding of other locations and cultures. And enjoy the rich diversity of our world.
