Long Term Geography Goals and Planning

In order to make our study meaningful, I tried to determine what my goals were in teaching geography, especially this young. Here's what I came up with for Kinde, in approximate order of importance:

1. To create a sense of place, both in where we live and in general of other places to understand when she hears about them

2. To understand how all political regions depend on each other, and specifically how it matters to our lives what happens far away (primarily what food/resources come from where)

3. To recognize and celebrate the differences in surroundings, lifestyle, and culture between us and other places, while maintaining the basic sameness of humanity and without viewing foreign as fundamentally "other"

4. To understand which and in what way cultural features are determined by the physical geography

5. To be able to label a map and know what political regions border each other

6. To lay the groundwork for a study of history

Some of this will be largely irrelevant this year as we will be focusing on the states of our own country, but I am leaving out some other geography works and books that may provoke conversations in which I will want to bear these goals in mind. Once we have moved beyond creating an immediate sense of place (our neighborhood, our city, our state, our country, our continent) I do want to focus more on places farther in distance and/or culture. My US-raised children are unlikely to be totally uninformed about, or have major prejudices against, Europe or Australia, for example. Africa and Asia are going to be of higher priority to cover and reflect the internal diversity of for us.

I will post details as we pursue our study of the states. My general geography plan for the long term, however, is this (and I retain my right to completely toss this and start over):

US states, approx 1 state/week
North America ~ 6 weeks
South America ~ 6 weeks
Africa ~10 weeks
Asia ~ 10 weeks
Middle East ~ 2 weeks
Europe ~ 8 weeks
Australia and Oceana ~ 3 weeks

Then we will start over with the states as Pre will be ready to participate fully and Kinde will be ready to delve deeper, do her own research on topics of interest and comparison, and remember more. None of this study will include history.

I should mention that in my fantasy world we will also be spending a year on the road in the middle school years traveling to all 48 continental states and then one or two years abroad experiencing the world. This is far enough away I can still completely convince myself it is not only possible but reasonable.

Montessori Geography or Not

In general, the Montessori approach to anything is to start with the whole, and then delve into the parts. In general, I think this is great. Learn about trees as a whole, then about leaves, etc. In many topics, this really helps the transition between concrete and abstract; a child can see a big tree easily. They can break it down into leaves, branches, trunk, and roots as they look more closely. If they look really closely, they can see that the leaf has parts. Then it's not so hard to think that maybe those parts are made of parts too. If they get out their microscope, they can see the cells, and understand better than before working through this process that they are parts of the leaf. And if they are ready, it won't be too much of a leap to think that cells have parts, and that those parts may *do* something, and learn about photosynthesis. As I get deeper into the reality of implementing the Montessori method, however, I am realizing that there is one really big topic that is not served well by this process; geography.

In my experience (and I am not trained, nor have I by any means seen them all) Montessori political geography albums begin with the globe. Even with some expanding map work, this seems like an enormous, insane leap to thrust upon a preschooler. A child who in all other areas is understood to be incapable of abstraction is supposed to imagine that we are all on a big ball in the middle of vast nothing? The maps are presented beginning with all the continents of the world, then the individual continents, and finally countries with a breakdown of the specific states/provinces of the child's country. This seems totally opposite to the idea of moving gently to abstraction that really is the heart of the "whole-to-parts" method. I think there is some desire also to start with something conceptually huge and inspiring that makes the kids want to delve deeper into understanding. That doesn’t really work for me either, however, as with a history in astrophysics specializing in the collisions of galaxies, I have trouble summoning the same sense of wonder Kinde’s teacher did holding a globe and exclaiming with wide eyes “This is our whole world!” And ultimately I just feel that the understanding derived from beginning with things the student comprehends and expanding outward in distance and abstraction is more important. Despite Kinde's original introduction to geography in her year of Montessori preschool, and our conventional efforts last year, I am shifting gears this year (and in the future for Pre). We are moving to a system starting with what is close and relevant to the child and moving out from there. Generally this looks like a progression:

Basic mapping and developing our sense of place in our own local
Neighborhood
City
County
State (presented by region)
Country
Continent
Other continents

Last Year's Approach to Geography - Africa

I actually started this post to discuss my larger problems with the traditional Montessori approach to geography, and realized that I had written a full post on what we did last year before I even got to most of that, so this is part one on the geography theme.

The "continent" boxes are a quintessential Montessori work that I immediately struggled with when I started to plan our geography shelves. My brain immediately rebelled against summarizing an entire continent. I realize that the bits are intended to show diversity and be sorted (the moose goes mostly in Canada, the sombrero is for Mexico, and the hamburger is for the USA), and that more sophisticated examples can be chosen than I have listed, but the whole box system seems to be really fraught with peril for massive generalization, stereotyping, and ultimately even racism. Consider especially Africa; how many people outside Africa believe that all Africans, or at least some in all areas, dress and live like the Masai, speak Swahili, and see gorillas *and* lions regularly? I was pretty sure that giving them a box full of fun animals was only going to cement that no matter how much I said they were from different areas (and how easy is it to get animals that aren't the "classic" examples anyway?). I really want my girls to be as comfortable with African geography and a general sense that fundamentally the same people with cool cultural differences (from us and each other) live there as they likely will be with Europe, if that makes sense. My African geography education was total crap, as evidenced by the fact that (and I can't believe I'm admitting this publically) before we did this I thought Kenya was on the western coast. And I had a very good friend living there at the time.

Last year my attempt at  this was to make Africa our first continent of study and spend a very long time doing it. Realistically, unless you are going to do a doctoral dissertation on Africa you are going to be sampling as even within countries there are hundreds of ethnic groups and languages. My goal was to be obvious to the kids that we were *sampling* culturally, as my girls (well, really only one as Pre at that point was PreVerbal) learned about the true differences in the land and animals. I broke our study into regions and had a Five in a Row - style study of based on a picture book about somewhere in it:

West: 
FIAR-approach books (one week each): Bintou's Braids and I Lost My Tooth In Africa
Books on the shelf: Ikenna Goes to Nigeria, Here Comes our Bride
One Big Family: Sharing Life in an African Village, Welcome Dede!, Head, Body, Legs
Books I made a point to read through: Meet Our New Student from Mali
Non-Fiction Video: West Africa for Kids
Reading Rainbow: I Lost My Tooth in Africa
Traditional crafts: Batik (glue resist on fabric), Adinkra block printing, and Kente strip weaving from African Crafts: Fun Things to Make and Do from West Africa
Sensory bin: Savannah (wood chips, raffia, small blue play silk watering hole, Plan Toys balancing tree), pygmy hippopotamus, Colobus monkey, dwarf crocodile, duiker

North:
FIAR-approach books (one week each):  My Father's Shop and The Day of Ahmed's Secret
Books on the shelf: The Butter Man, The Giraffe That Walked to Paris, We're Sailing Down the Nile
Traditional crafts: Rug weaving, pottery jug (make and paint)
Sensory bin: Desert (sand, small blue play silk and mini trees oasis), camel, gazelle, Fennec fox, hyena, ostrich

Central:
FIAR-approach books (one week each): The Village of Round and Square Houses
Books on the shelf: Rain School
Traditional craft: tapestry crochet
Sensory Bin: Tropical Rain Forest (green leaves, big trees made out of construction paper and paper towel tubes with "vines"), chimpanzee, gorilla, leopard, forest elephant

East:
FIAR-approach books (one week each): Wangari's Trees of Peace and My Rows and Piles of Coins
Books on the shelf: Elizabeti's Doll, Mama Elizabeti, Sosu's Call, Mama Panya's Pancakes, Masai and I, Faraway Home
Book I made a point to read through: Meet Our New Student from Tanzania
Non-Fiction Video: East Africa for Kids
Reading Rainbow: Mufaru's Beautiful Daughters and Bringing the Rain to Kapiti Plain
Traditional crafts: basket weaving, Masai necklace beading
Sensory bin: Savannah (wood chips, raffia, Plan Toys balancing tree), rhino, elephant, lion, giraffe, cheetah, zebra, wild dog

Southern:
FIAR-approach books (one week each): At the Crossroads and Jamela's Dress
Books on the shelf: The Gift of the Sun, A South African Night, Bongani's Day, A Child's Day in a South African City
Book I made a point to read through: Meet Our New Student from Zambia
Traditional craft: Mapula embroidery
Sensory bin: Savannah (wood chips, raffia, Plan Toys balancing tree), pangolin, bushbaby, meerkat, warthog, wildebeest, baboon, oryx, rhino, elephant

Works done throughout:
Puzzle map
Little flags to place on the puzzle (this might only have actually happened once)
Looked at pictures of landmarks, cities, and landscapes
Practiced recognizing and naming the countries
Cooked a meal out of Madhar Jaffrey's World Vegetarian or the Easy Menu Ethnic Cookbook for each region
Contacted someone we know who had lived or traveled in each region and asked questions mostly of Kinde's inspiration about what it was like there. We would have had cool trinkets from Egypt and live Skyping except my brother was evacuated...

We read the sections appropriate to our current region in:
Ashanti to Zulu 
Children Just Like Me
A Life Like Mine
African Atlas
"A Question and Answer Book" series of many countries (That format worked so well for us I read some of our other non-fiction books about the countries as though they were question and answer too. It really piqued her curiosity.)
Africa is Not a Country was always on the shelf

As a side note, I was extremely disappointed in the [Country] in Pictures: Visual Geography series. I had such high hopes from the title. They may very well be excellent for older children, but they were *very* heavy on text and actually had far fewer pictures than almost any other series, regardless of intended age. Very much a misnomer.

Overall, this was a pretty cool unit, and one that I definitely intend to repeat when Pre is ready to grasp any of it and Kinde is ready to delve deeper and retain more. At some point I may have a chance to post the details of our "FIAR" studies, but we'll see. As we worked through this, though, I realized that it still felt like the wrong way to start with geography. More on that soon...