Great Sites and Games for Learning All About Geography
Geography isn’t about memorizing countries, rivers, oceans and all the rest of that stuff we remember from school. It is about how our world works. It’s about cultures and peoples, about how the climate and weather creates the opportunity for cultural growth, it is about our world. Geography can be exciting and fun, even entertaining.
I’ve searched around the internet for a few great educational web sites and games that are also entertaining and fun. Whether you are a home school parent, or a parent of a 3rd grader in a school with 1,000 kids, or if you are a kid (old or young) that loves learning about our world, here are some of my favorite places:
http://www.nationalgeographic.com Check out this great site, for fun and trivia about our world, and the people in our world. Information about The Geography Bee contest, held in Washington, D.C., USA each year, is also here on the National Geographic website. The site has a cool kid’s magazine online, really cool science experiments, a bunch of terrific games and more geography information and fun than I have seen anywhere else. National Geographic covers such diverse topics as animals and oceans, kids in different cultures, crafts, cooking and recipes, and some great travel information. (Can you tell I like this site?) Try the Wild and Wacky Add-Your-Own Words stories. I had a lot of fun doing the Royal Vacation and the Egyptian Diary stories. The kids I care for had fun, too.
http://www.triviaplaza.com Trivia and quizzes covering geography, science, nature, and just about anything you would want to know about our world. Quizzes come in on different levels, and you can learn about the trivia by searching the web, or design your own trivia quizzes, based on the subjects you are learning currently. There are many geography quizzes, and a lot of other subjects, such as science, computers, music, movies and literature.
http://www.cloudnet.com Cloud Net is a fantastic database of lesson plans, covering all subjects and a range of grade and age groups. The geography section is just one of the subject areas I’ve used, and there are new lesson plans added frequently. Take a peek at the multicultural lesson plans – such as the complete lesson plan for holding a multicultural fair and the multicultural ‘pavilion’ for home or classroom.
http://lessonplancentral.com Lesson Plan Central is just what it sounds like. In the Geography section, there are terrific lesson plans for homeschooled and on-site schooled children. Some of my favorites are on the need to preserve the earth’s biodiversity, a lesson plan called “Know Your Rites”, which goes into interesting detail about coming of age ceremonies around the world, and a plan for learning about mummification processes and culture in diverse cultures, called “Mummies Unwrapped”.
Homeschooled or ‘normal’ schooled, kids of all ages can learn to love geography. Personally, I think that parents who take on the responsibility of offering their children a wide range of educational choices are doing them the biggest favor of all. Homeschoolers often have a great home library, and access all kinds of resources. Parents of site-schooled children can build a library, too, complete with the tools for learning and exploring our world. Outfit your home learning area with a globe, maps, books and games (check out Where in the World is Carmen San Diego for kids) or projects – Geography Wizardry for Kids, by Barrons, has around 200 cool and educational activities for kids and parents. You can learn to make a map, design a postage stamp of your own, find out how fossils got where they are, and more.
Make learning fun, whether to enrich your school’s programs or to explore the world without a school at all. And, share in the fun with your children; you never know where you will want to know the educational culture of the Akha tribespeople of Thailand, or the puberty rites of the Yanomamo culture in Brazil. Besides, why should kids have ALL the fun!
