Many parents are entering new territory, faced with homeschooling until schools get back to normal. Those dealing with an abrupt shift to homeschooling can take solace in the fact that it's temporary, and there can be some major benefits.
To cover a broad curriculum at home can be challenging. While STEM subjects present significant remote learning roadblocks, homeschooling social studies, and specifically, homeschooling geography is something that's easy to accomplish.
In this article, we'll look take an optimistic view of the temporary homeschooling you're faced with, examining positive aspects that will help you enrich your students' learning experience. We'll wrap up with a look at how effectively you can cover geography topics in a homeschooling scenario.
The Upside of Homeschooling
Between now and the time that homeschooling is no longer necessary, you have the opportunity to develop a connection with your students, address academic shortcomings, and foster a love of learning. Below is a list of just some advantages that homeschooling provides:
- The opportunity to customize and individualize curriculum. You can pick up where teachers left off and advance on track, so no one is behind when school resumes.
- A chance to improve academic performance. Homeschooling interaction can reveal problem areas and provide parents the opportunity to personally encourage improvement in specific areas.
- Utilize more effective learning approaches. By using online resources like videos and learning games, you can engage students more effectively than with lecture-based teaching.
- Create a positive and healthy learning environment. One-on-one or small group learning situations can bring out the best in some students. You may discover promising aptitude that never came out in the classroom atmosphere.
You can make good use of your time as a homeschool teacher, developing a better awareness of your students' academic strengths and weaknesses. In the next section, we'll look at one specific part of your curriculum that should never present problems—homeschooling geography.
Homeschooling Geography Resources
There's an impressive array of online resources for teaching social studies, especially geography topics. Here are some of the best:
- Seterra, the publisher of this blog post, is the ultimate map quiz site. You can use Seterra from any web browser to explore the world and learn about its countries, capitals, cities, rivers, lakes, and more. Supporting dozens of languages and offering leaderboards and custom quizzes, Seterra is a great tool for homeschooling geography.
- Geography Now is an educational YouTube channel that's in the process of covering every single country in the world, in alphabetical order. These guys go out of their way to making their videos fun.
- Another awesome YouTube channel for homeschooling geography topics is WonderWhy. It infuses the content with fascinating nuggets of current and historical information. You’ll find videos that discuss topics like the oldest country in the world, how the world map has changed since WWI, and more.
- Geoguessr is an engaging location discovery game that's been popular since the day it was released in 2013. It places you somewhere in the world, with the only clue about your location being a Google Maps Street View. Your job is to figure out where you are, and then drop a pin to lock in your guess. A great classroom activity, Geoguessr involves fun competition and a lot of learning.
- TheTrueSizeOf is a fascinating website that lets you drag and drop countries around the map to compare their relative size. It’s easy to compare the size of one country—you're able to see the transformation that occurs as you drag a country away from its normal latitude, leaving little doubt about the size distortion that's caused by map projections.
- There are awesome geography videos on YouTube. Countries of the World is a video that helps students memorize the countries' names, covering them in alphabetical order as part of an entertaining musical roll call of nations. It's similar to Nations of the World, in which a character from the show Animaniacs circles the globe singing the names of all the countries. Tour the States is an entertaining music video that begins with a remarkable demonstration of free-hand map drawing, while the 50 States and Capitals Song features animated states serenading the viewer as a 50-state choir.
While almost every part of a grade school curriculum can be handled online, geography is an area of study that allows for highly effective remote learning.
If you're a parent faced with homeschooling challenges while we anxiously wait for schools to return to normal operation, stay positive. There are significant advantages to homeschooling, and you can rely on countless online resources to help you.
Some subjects are easier to teach at home than others, but homeschooling social studies, and specifically, homeschooling geography should be relatively easy.
We hope this brief look at homeschooling and online geography resource has been helpful and that you're able to provide a rich learning experience for your homeschool students.