Helping Kids Learn About Geography

With the Olympics coming up you might be talking more to your kids about different countries and pulling out maps or a globe to show them where different countries are.

If this is your first time introducing concepts of geography to little ones, check out this great list of books about maps and globes from Gift of Curiosity. The list includes basic factual books as well as story books that involve mapping and get kids thinking about the fact that they are part of a neighborhood, town, state, nation and world.

You can do that physically with these Me on the Map activities from Living Montessori Now. I love the basic nesting circles, but stacking boxes and towers are a really cool representation of the different places we are part of as well.

Whether your kids are just learning about maps or are a bit older, National Geographic has a great collection of map skills activities for all ages of elementary school students. From mapping the classroom or the park for the littlest students to studying historic maps and comparing them to those of today, there’s something for everyone here.

How do you use maps in learning? I have an old atlas I pull out a lot when we talk about different countries, we have some nation and world puzzles, and I’ve got my eye out for a secondhand globe we can play with. I’d love to hear your ideas, too.

[Photo by Winn Brewer via National Geographic.]

Several countries have a day set aside to honor and recognize their inventors, but Nov. 9 is a special one that’s known as Tag der Erfinder in German. It’s celebrated in Germany, Austria and Switzerland and it falls on Nov. 9 because that’s the birthday of Hedy Lamarr.

Hedy Lamarr is widely known as an actress but there’s a lot more to her story. You can get a little of it geared to little kids in the Little People, Big Dreams book Hedy Lamarr (32 pages, hardcover, published 2023 by Frances Lincoln Childrens Books, suggested retail price $15.99).

The book explores her birth in Austria and how she spent time when she was young coming up with inventions. She became an actress, married an arms dealer, made her escape to America and became an actress again.

But she also helped develop a frequency-hopping signal device for airplanes that was used by the Americans and their allies during World War II. That technology became the basis for wireless technology such as wifi and GPS.

While Inventor’s Day is a great time to learn about Hedy Lamarr, you can take this opportunity to check out books and do little studies on lots of different inventors. If there’s an inventor or an invention your child is particularly interested in, that’s a great place to start. It’s fun to think about all the things we use every day that didn’t always exist; someone had to invent them!

For a start here at Craft Gossip you can learn more about Garrett Morgan, who invented traffic lights; Maria Oroso, who developed a clay oven that could cook food without electricity; and more female inventors and scientists.

And for more general inventors’ fun, check out this inventors word search from Fun Findery (and another from Let’s Do Puzzles) or take a quiz on inventors and their inventions from Flanders Family Home Life.

Have you read?

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