DIY Geography

There are a lot of wonderful geography curricula out there, but when my son wanted to design his own course, we jumped at the chance to honor his motivated interest and unique style!

In conversation about how he'd like his course to look, we aimed to fit it into a 9-month school year, and also to focus more on the areas of the world he was less familiar with than his home continent of North America. Obviously, even 1 continent could provide plenty of study work for several years, but - we were looking for a intro-type tie-things-together course, which worked perfectly for him.

We divided the globe into 9 "big chunks," omitting North America. Then we made a list of goals he'd do over the course of that month - one “chunk” of the world per month. Our checklist included 7 separate pieces, and . . . yes, I'm sure it sometimes was an elaborate scheme to get us to take him to a Chinese restaurant, but we had a plan, and a list, and we set off! Here are our categories, and here's our pdf for each month.

We bought a poster-size map for the year, and then labeled it with the titles of our books & documentaries. I let him decide on the "25 most important things" from the map - sometimes I agreed with his decisions, and sometimes I didn't! Sometimes there were more than 25 important things, but . . . he has a rock solid start (and of course by high school, he already knew quite a few of those important pieces!) We used Uncle Josh's Outline Maps for our map work, but honestly any good black-line printable maps would work fine.

This turned out to be one of our favorite DIY courses, and we both loved the new people and stories we came across together.