5 Educational Resources and Exercises to Teach Geography at Home
The use of technology, crafts, and games, contributes to making the learning of school subjects much more attractive and dynamic. Today, we’ll share with you how you can use these resources to teach geography to children at home. This is a good way to help them consolidate their knowledge and awaken their curiosity about the world we live in.
The best thing about these times is that you have many tools available for homeschooling. Here’s a list of some of them.
1. The website of the National Geographic Institute
The website of the National Geographic Institute (IGN) contains a wide variety of free educational resources that allow you to teach geography to children. In the EducaIGN section, you’ll find didactic material, videos, games, and maps for use in three different age groups:
- Primary education: From 6 to 12 years old
- Secondary and baccalaureate: From 12 to 18 years old
- University: 18 years old and up
The best thing about this site is that all the information is always up-to-date and, in addition, all the contents are prepared by experts in the field.
2. Homemade world map
Doing in order to learn is the most effective way to reinforce knowledge. For this reason, using crafts to teach geography to children at home is very effective. You’ll see how those words that used to be so difficult to memorize, such as continents or countries, are now easy for kids to learn and remember quickly.
An excellent resource is to plan the creation of a world map. It’s a very easy craft to make and one that you can use for different purposes. With it, you teach your children to locate countries and capital cities, distinguish geographical elements (rivers, reliefs, lakes, or coasts, among others), and locate themselves on a map.
3. Geography trivia
Trivia is a dynamic and fun game of questions and answers, especially when you play with the whole family. You can make one with geography topics, such as the capitals of countries, the location of mountains, languages, customs, foods, or songs. You can also look for videos on YouTube or applications that already contain trivia and are ideal for having fun and learning geography together with the kids at home.
4. Geography games online
The site World Geography Games can be used in 7 different languages (English, Spanish, German, French, Bosnian, Dutch, and Polish), making it a great tool to help you teach geography to children at home. At the same time, it’s also very useful for practicing a foreign language. Here, you’ll find a lot of interactive games to learn more details about our planet.
Among the materials on the web, you have maps to locate countries, provinces, rivers, flags, cities, seas, islands, continents, deserts, and mountains, among others. In addition, you can learn more about other geography topics, such as the structure of the earth and the atmosphere.
5. Physical and political map puzzles
A very entertaining way to teach geography to children at home is to have the whole family put together a puzzle of a map. There can be thousands of pieces, so pay close attention. This is also a good exercise for learning to read maps, as sometimes you have to use real maps to compare and see if you are on the right track.
Teach about our world with different resources
You don’t have to be an expert to set up a homeschooling day. With a little imagination and the ability to find exercises that are entertaining and different, you’ll quickly capture the attention of your little ones. This way, you can collaborate to support their learning processes.
Little ones will surely get excited when you suggest sharing geography games as a family, watching a video together, imagining exploring the world, or going on a trip to unknown lands. To do so, they can create colorful maps, discover other languages, or surf the Internet.
In this way, you’ll not only teach kids geography, but you’ll also show them that it’s possible to travel the world without even setting foot on the street.
All cited sources were thoroughly reviewed by our team to ensure their quality, reliability, currency, and validity. The bibliography of this article was considered reliable and of academic or scientific accuracy.
- Instituto Geográfico Nacional. Gobierno de España. https://www.ign.es/web/ign/portal
- Juegos de Geografía. https://world-geography-games.com/es/
- Gonzalez Sacristán, C. (2019). Universidad de Burgos, Trabajo Fin de Master. La didáctica de la Geografía y las TIC a través de la Cartografía y las imágenes. https://riubu.ubu.es/bitstream/handle/10259/5211/Gonz%C3%A1lez_Sacrist%C3%A1n.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
