Learning Geography (Things we like--Updated to include Aunty Dot)

Aunty Dot's Incredible Adventure Atlas, by Eljay Yildirim, is Crayons' favourite geography resource right now. We bought it a few years ago from Hampstead House; it was published in 1997 but is still listed on Amazon. Aunty Dot and Uncle Frank have won a trip around the world; the book is full of their letters home (real letters in real envelopes), maps of their travels, and photos of their souvenirs. "Well, here we are in busy Beijing. Elephants weren't such a good idea--if we'd stuck with them we would never have gotten here! Beijing is a real contrast from our journey across the Tibetan Plateau, where we hardly met a soul. There were plenty of yaks, though--very useful animals!"

Children'sAtlas.com: "The Book, CD-Rom, and Website That Work Together." I posted about this rummage-sale find a few weeks ago. Published in 1997, still occasionally available (on Amazon); the CD-Rom runs fine on our computer but the website is gone. Crayons found this a lot of fun and fairly challenging, although she bought up all the "souvenirs" so fast, by playing a couple of favourite games and winning a certain number of points, that she lost some of her interest in trying out the other activities...we'll probably bring it out again next fall anyway.

We found Hammond's Discovering Maps in a sale bin at a department store. There is another edition available on Amazon, but this one is pretty up to date (2006). Ponytails has been using this for general map skills, and the Apprentice also found it useful for a twelfth-grade class that required knowing facts about the "world's longest rivers" etc. It also offers little tips like the fact that if you point at the North Star with one hand and at the horizon with the other, the resulting angle will tell you how many degrees north or south of the equator you are. (How you're supposed to measure the angle while holding your arms like that, I'm not sure, but anyway...)

Maps and Globes: a classic Reading Rainbow selection--looks like a little kids' book, but there's a fair amount of information in there. "Globes (unlike flat maps) are shaped exactly like the earth--like a ball or sphere. They are very tiny models--the earth is really 30 to 40 million times bigger than the globe in your classroom. Globes, because they are round, put all the world's geography in its proper place; they give the truest possible view of the whole earth."

Cool Geography, by Jane Glicksman--something I used with The Apprentice a long time ago (it was published in 1998). Black and white drawings, lots of experiments and things to do. "Let's say you took a walk with a special handheld receiver. You could find out your location, speed, and altitude, thanks to signals you sent that bounced back to the receiver from three or more of the 24 GPS satellites orbiting the earth. Think of these signals, called waypoints, as a crumb trail, just like the one Hansel and Gretel left behind as they wandered through the forest. From your crumb trail, or waypoints, your receiver traces your route as you stroll along--so forget about using getting lost as an excuse for missing dinner ever again!"

Geography Songs--don't all homeschoolers know about these? "The British Isles, the British Isles..." The Apprentice used to sing the Scandinavia song at the top of her lungs on the swingset, which the elderly lady next door found amusing as well as educational.

We just bought World in a Box from Hampstead House Books, and I'm hoping that Ponytails will be able to use it next year. You get a CD-Rom with customizable (printable) maps, an instruction/ideas book, and some little extras like a compass (actually two compasses, both the drawing kind and the magnetic kind), push pins, and a protractor. It looks like a good followup to the Hammond book.