This is the place to find my kids geography resources. If you would prefer resources related to Around the World in 80 Days, you can find them
here.
Unit studies and lapbooks
Trip Around the World (Unit Study). This 144 page e-book only covers 15 countries, but I did find it quite useful for ideas. There is a preview button at the top of the page. For France (as an example) it gives some French words, ideas for a picnic, information about landmarks, 5 study ideas and 3 fiction books). I think this will be one I use more than once.
BackPacker by Wild Card Games. This is a great card game that we have all enjoyed (including the 7yo). It is complicated to start with and we needed several run throughs to understand it. In the game you are backpacking around the world, and have to collect photographs of different countries, whilst coping with traveller difficulties (sickness, missing planes and so on). I thought this gave a good feel of which countries were in which contintents. There are more details on BackPacker.com (and they will ship worldwide).
Online Resources
Postcrossing is a good way to recieve postcards from around the world. It is free to sign up, but you must send cards before you will recieve any. Cards we recieved included Germany, Switzerland and Japan. It was fun to locate the sender on the globe.
Travel Scrapbook Pages would be good to use in a 'Travel Journal'. When studying Around the World in 80 Days we used a page to write about each country we visited. For more information about Journaling see my Writing Projects for Kids.
I give details of an online geography game on this page in my freebies section.
Jenny sent me this great Yahoo group based around the book 'Flat Stanley'. The children make their own 'flat traveller', laminate it and then send it to a host family with a journal. The host family then complete the journal and return it with some momentoes, pictures, photos etc of what they have been getting up to with their flat traveller. Sounds like a great kids geography idea.
If your children enjoy online quiz type games, then I can recommend these geography quizzes from Jetpunk. We really liked the city skyline one (which shows pictures of skylines and you have to guess which city) but the satellite image quiz was fun too.
Home School Ideas
For more Kids Geography Ideas, see the following
Photographic Treasure Hunt - set up a mapped treasure hunt using photographs to find specific locations.
by Sally Hewitt. This has quite a good atlas, with stickers (flags, animals and places), postcards and a passport. But its quite hard to get hold of and I think the Usborne Sticker Atlas of the World
or Sticker Atlas Flags
would be just as much fun.
is very comprehensive and would take a long time to work through.
