Thoughts on Teaching My Child to find Shizuoka on a Map

I'm thinking about my children's education a lot these days, trying to learn all I can about learning and teaching, trying to figure out what's what and how to do this Home Education thing. As much as I resisted the idea in the past, I'm starting to see that teaching my boys might be kinda fun, and is totally appropriate for us considering we, my husband and I, are life-long learners ourselves.

Me, I'm curious about just about every subject, from particle physics to spelling, which isn't to say that I understand anything about particle physics, or expect my five year old son to.

We'll be able to model for them how and why to learn. We'll be able to provide ample rime for review so that new information can move easily from short-term memory into long term memory, etc.

Anyway, I was thinking the other night about geography. I bought this awesome DK World Atlas at the Classical Conversations Parent Practicum last week. I fell in love with this thing the very first day of the practicum and I couldn't pass it up. I'd show you a picture of the book, only I don't know how.

The CC people believe a knowledge of geography is important because it makes you more alert to things that are going on in the world. You'll hear the name of a small city in Japan, and think, hey, I know something about that place; I wonder what is going on there. You'll be more alert to the interests and concerns of people you'll never meet. In my own experience, it makes me happy that my five year old son can look at a map of the world, point to Japan, and say, "hey, my uncle David lives there."

This was my brain wave the other night.

What if Parker and I look at a map and I ask him to find Brazil for me. And then Estonia. And then Nepal. Or what if we start out even more simply. We look at a labeled map and I ask him to point to Australia, or Oceania, or whatever it is we're calling that particular continent these day. (The name of the continent has changed recently, or hadn't you heard? I only know about the change by chance.) And then we look for Europe and Asia and Antarctica and all of the seven continents and four oceans. He learned the names of the continents and oceans at VBS last year, so this isn't entirely new information for him. What if we do that regularly over an extended period of time? After a while, he will no longer need to look at the words on the map in order to find the continents or oceans. He'll have memorized their location on the map. And we'll find a map that has a different perspective from time to time, and then he'll see that the locational relationship between the continents stays the same even when their place on the map doesn't. In this way he will no longer be tied to using only one map, but will be able to find Asia on any map.

It all seems so natural, and in the process he and I will learn together what I had already forgotten. I remember memorizing maps in elementary school, but I don't remember what was on them. When someone mentioned North Carolina the other day I realized that even though I know it has a coast, and that it is to the North of the state I live in, which is Alabama, all this time I had been thinking that it was West of us. My mental U.S. map had us traveling through Georgia on the right instead of on the left.