Making Geography Fun for Little Ones

One of our favorite family activities is locating new countries on our globe and learning about the people and cultures of said countries. Margaret and I hope that our boys grow up to appreciate the beauty and diversity of our world and its living creatures, and what better way to encourage this than to spend family time tracing our fingers all over our globe.

We try to make our family globe times fun and relevant to things that they understand at their current ages. We do this by trying to help them remember just one thing about each new country that they discover.

Our boys associate Columbia with coffee, Mongolia with goji berries, Italy with pasta, Japan with electronics, and India, Pakistan, Mexico, England, New Zealand, and Taiwan with various friends. They also know that Singapore has an unusually low crime rate, that the elephants that they saw at the zoo likely came from some place south of the Sahara in Africa, and that they can leave mango sorbet outdoors without it melting in Antarctica.

To give them another way of remembering the countries that they discover, Margaret likes to help them color flags, which we have plastered (using painter's tape) all over our kitchen.

I must acknowledge that our stay-at-home globe-trotting has done wonders for my own knowledge base, as prior to us getting started with this, I was ignorant of the locations of many countries that I've long known about but never visited.

Recently, we were grateful to view a documentary called Babies, a most perfect adjunct to our study of different countries and cultures.

A look at the first year of life of four babies and their families in San Francisco, Tokyo, the Mongolian steppes, and Namibia, Babies gave all four of us perspective that we probably couldn't have obtained even if we had traveled to these countries.

For those of you who haven't seen Babies, here's the trailer:

I'm sure that most of us can imagine the vast environmental differences for babies born in different corners of the world, but to actually see these differences on film fascinates.

Well, just another snippet of the homeschooling that we're doing these days. Our older son is attending kindergarten a couple of days a week, and while we're grateful for his wonderful-in-every-way teacher and the well behaved and generally delightful children that our son is developing friendships with, we are still doing what we can to make learning fun at home.

If you don't have a globe and want to introduce one to your children or grandchildren, have a look at the many varieties that are widely available here:

Popular Globes at Amazon.com