The Old Schoolhouse - March 2012

Academic Spotlight—Speaking of Geography

How should you teach geography? Make it fun by using lots of hands-on activities.

•;Create maps of your home or neighborhood.;
•;Post a map on a wall and use pins or tabs to pin-
point where family members, friends, or missionar-
ies live.

•;Make salt-dough topographical maps of places near and far.

•;Pass out maps when you travel, and teach your children how to read them.

•;Incorporate geography when you’re teaching other subjects.

•;Pull out a map or globe when you’re reading a book or studying history and look up the places you read about.

•;Use a blackline map on which to document the route traveled by a famous historical ;gure or . . . by your own family when you took a road trip!

Geography is all around you; help your children no- tice and learn about the earth’s fascinating features at home and through your travels—even if it’s just a walk to the park.

Looking for more ideas? Take a look at some of these unit studies and other products—you’re sure to ;nd something that will interest your children in learning more about the geographic features of God’s unique world.

Runkle Geography Runkle Geography makes learning fun as we watch this perfect home, a gi; from our Father, reveal its splendid wonders. Of course we need to learn the basic stu;, identify the continents, countries, bodies of water, physical characteristics of Earth. Basic knowledge of latitude, longitude, role of prevailing winds and ocean currents help provide insight into the patterns of this remarkable home. Why are deserts where they are? Have we caused them to spread? Why are cities where they are? How do they change the surrounding regions? As more land is covered with asphalt where will we ;nd new farmland? What are we doing to our water? ;ink about this! God made sure we would never run out of fresh water when he designed the water cycle. We can pollute a lake and make it unusable. Heat from the sun evaporates the water leaving behind all the pollutants. Condensation cools the clean, fresh water as it returns to earth as rain, snow, sleet, hail, etc. His gi;, fresh water once again. ;e fun is not only in the answers but in knowing the big picture of how our earth works. Runkle Geography gives you understanding and mastery and a little bit of insight into our future.

Visualize World Geography Can you ;nd Italy on a world map... because you see it as a boot? Based on brain science research, the Visualize World Geography method allows you to ;nd all countries just as easily. ;e brain, by design, processes incoming visual information, as either meaningful—there is a match within existing visual/brain circuits—or meaningless, no match occurs, so the brain immediately discards it. ;is explains why most people do not recognize and cannot identify the countries of the world: since the shape of a country, without the Visualize World Geography method, has no match, the brain rules it as a meaningless bit of information, and therefore, discards it without bothering to process it. For this reason, the VWG method replaces all other countries’ meaningless shapes with illustrations of easy to recognize objects, like the boot for Italy. Consequently, what your brain was unable to process before as being a speci;c country, it now can easily see, mentally manipulate, and automatically store within long-term memory. In fact, a;er implementing the VWG method, you will look at a world map, and forever see it as a landscape of recognizable objects; try looking at Italy and NOT seeing it as a boot!