Incorporating Geography

I have never gone through a geography course with the boys.  We have always incorporated geography into our other subjects.  In the early days we learned the location of the countries and area of the US that were in the Five in a Row books that we rowed. We now do history mostly chronologically with Biblioplan.  As we go through history we do maps of the area that we are studying.  This year we are doing zoology for science.  Once again we are studying geography by looking up where the animals live.  So as you can see you can incorporate geography in a lot of places in your homeschool.  I have found that geography is easily included in history and science (especially the life sciences).

Another way we are doing geography this year is through a handwriting program called A-Z Mystery Flags from LightHome Publications.  Each page is a different letter of the alphabet...there is a mystery flag that the boys have to figure out the country for (a country that starts with that letter) and then the boys have to write out the countries for that letter in cursive.  We actually use Italics... and I have them write the countries in italics.  Because they have done italics their whole lives, they have a hard time reading regular cursive.  This program is giving them the opportunity to practice reading cursive.  I then have the boys look up and locate each country on their page.  Here are some pictures of them working on "Page M" today.  There were a ton of countries that start with the letter "M" so we did a lot of locating!

Here is Noah trying to figure out what the mystery flag is.

Working on handwriting...

Looking up the countries.

I am planning on using A-Z Exotic Animals next with the boys. As we go through these animals we will look on a map to find their habitats.