Stress Free Homeschool Geogrophy

With so many of the people talking about homeschooling in my life now with the recent school shootings and threats I decided we would dive a bit into some of the craziness of our homeschool life so those of you on the fence can see how you can do this without a ton of stress and those of you in the homeschooling trenches can find fun stuff that has worked for us.

Geography can be fun

To track what the kids have learned we are using really cool Scratch off USA and scratch-off the world map. As the kids finish learning a large amount of information on an area and can sufficiently answer questions on the area they can scratch it off. I plan on starting a new set when this one is done so the younger children can join. 

DVDs and streaming videos are a great option for teaching kids geography and about the cultures in each area. The world is a vast and wonderful place when we open our minds and our hearts to the vast cultures the world has to offer this list of the Best Movies for Kids From Around the World from Kid World Citizen has made choosing movies so much easier. We love the Disney Nature movies for showing the kids what different parts of the world look like and what lives there.

As always our favorite tools for homeschooling are books, books, and more books. For geography, we focus on books about different parts of the world, cultures, and good old nature. Barefoot Books offers so many culturally diverse books making them a great option for us. National Geographic has a lot of great books showing cultures and claimants of different parts of the world.

We have several inflatable globes running around the house. I love to have the kids pick a random place and then we google the place they found on the globe using my phone. This is a great way to calm and change directions when the kids get a bit wild or start bickering like kids do. The little ones love this. I hope that one day it will lead to them knowing where different things are not the globe without having to really focus to teach it. We also have a ton of maps running around the house because well that is just the kind of person I am. I love being able to show the kids places on a map and help them get an idea of how far away p0laces are when we read about them or see them on the news.

Sometimes we just dive in head first. Aprils theme with Mother Goose Time is the Ocean. So I dug out the ocean labels from day one and added them to our two scratch-off mats. When we studied It’s a Small World theme from Mother Goose Time we took the time to learn about each of the great wonders they sent lesson on a bit more in-depth. We studied places like China during the Chinese new year making paper lanterns with Mother Goose Time. It was a great way to pull the younger children into our study and get their interest.