My goal this year is simply for the younger two to learn the continents and for the older children to learn the names and positions of all the countries in Europe. In addition, I will be doing a short lesson on how geography influenced the crusades. This is the first time I’ve had specific geographical goals for our homeschool.
- The little ones will be using a variety of children’s atlas’ and puzzle maps:
- We will have a geography quest. This is an idea I gleaned from Heather at Blogshewrote. It will probably be a simple find a country on the globe or world map quest, but it’s a start. We have covered our table in a map of the world protector cloth, which we will use. This is useful because the world map is repeated three times across the stretch of our table so all the children can work on the quest at the same time:
- The children will be completing the European puzzle once each:
- We will play Mapominoes: Europe as a family
- We have also bought in a new to us game called 10 days in Europe which we the children have really enjoyed:
- We have been enjoying Atlas Adventures for years and even my five-year old enjoys it:
- I will allow all the children time on Google Earth to explore Europe
- The children will play the games available on this website. They include dragging European countries onto a map of Europe. The games get progressively more difficult.
- This year they will be required to write a report and give a presentation of a European country of their choice. I’m hoping they will learn not just from their own report but also from their siblings. This is something completely new to us, but should be fun!
- Geofood – Food for the day to hint at the country; a tortilla in shape of a European country or a meal from that country.
- We are currently making one of our paper mache maps of Europe so we will be able to be able to visualise where all the crusades took place. Here is the one we did to show Marco Polo’s journey to China:
And here is the one of the UK we made whilst we were learning about the Vikings:
Hopefully, by next summer, we will be European connoisseurs!