My daughter and I have traveled a lot together over her few short years, and we plan to do more traveling in the coming year. We’re hoping to go away to Costa Rica for at least a few weeks to learn about the cloud forest and enjoy the very different scenery. I visited Costa Rica in my early twenties and would love to return.
To prepare, I’ve purchased a children’s book about the place we will visit and we’re reading about the rainforest. Five-year-olds have a hard time conceiving of the distance between countries on a map, but we’re beginning to sketch out an idea of where Costa Rica is and how far away it is.
Today, my daughter demonstrated her knowledge of geography for me. She was working quietly on something in the bedroom, which sometimes makes me nervous. She came into the room and announced that she had created a world map on her bed. Using playsilks and pillows, she had made oceans and volcanoes and forests and all sorts of landmarks. It was an interesting child’s view of the world, and it would be a fun experiment to try with your kids as well.
My daughter is also very much into clay these days, and I’m considering using that interest to create a globe. We have a world map at home, but no globe, and I thought that it would be fun to cut out each of the continents and create our own. We may even paint it in colors that match the world’s biomes.
After that, we’re going to get an old-fashioned globe. You know, the kind that is in sepia tones? We’re going to trace the places we’ve been to and see where the people we know live right now. We may also use the globe to track our ancestry and the ancestry of those we know. It helps to link geography back to everyday reality.
How do you make world geography real for your child?
Image courtesy of fangol at Stock Exchange.