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While I was driving the other day I heard an advertisement for an online program created to help teach children geography. It sounded like the pretty standard "virtual exploration" most of these programs consist of, but it made me wonder how effective these programs actually are. Then I thought about how I was horrible at geography when I was younger, for some reason it just didn't seem relevent to me and so I lost interest in it. There isn't anything about geography that is especially uninteresting, but I think it was in the way it is taught that didn't work for me. I didn't actually learn about the world until I started traveling, and I'm not saying travel is necessarily the answer, but it was what I did prior to a trip that really taught me about geography. During the trip planning process I explored different itineraries based on my budget, interests, nearby locations, and special promotions. I went from not knowing anything about geography to being able to locate all the countries in Asia, most of Western Europe, North and East Africa, the Middle East, and North America (ok, that one is especially easy) on an unlabeled map. Why those regions? Simply because I planned trips to each region, I didn't necessarily travel to all of them, but the simple act of connecting something relevant for me to the location of different countries taught me more in a short time than a traditional geography lesson.
So how does trip planning translate into geography education for children? What about having children gather into groups and give them a fake budget to adhere to as they decide on a travel itinerary. The class can choose a theme or each group can have their own theme as to avoid too much duplication in itineraries. Each group then plays around with actual travel booking sites, making it more real world relevant, for pricing and travel routes. Then for the countries they "visit", each group member must research a topic of their choice and then come together to create a presentation and visual. After each presentation, the class can vote on a winning itinerary based on cost effective use of the budget, number of countries visited, most interesting trip, etc...
It simulates actual trip planning which makes learning about the world more relevant. The problem I had with learning about geography as a child was it was so far disconnected from my world that it was hard for me to actually imagine how the pieces fit into a whole.
Lately I've been reading a lot of Agatha Christie mysteries and I marvel at the logical way she planned out her novels. Since I was curious, I read a little of her biography and found out her father taught her math by giving her word problems, training her mind to think logically about how to solve a problem. Perhaps there is a correlation between making education relevant and matching how children learn.
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