What do Geography lessons look like once formal schooling begins? What in the world are “map questions” and how can my kids answer them if they aren’t fluent readers? On today’s podcast we explore the next step in our children’s education and how Geography is truly a delightful subject for lower elementary students in years one through three.

Listen Now:

Charlotte Mason, Volume 6 (Amazon) (Living Book Press – use code DELECTABLE for 10% off!)

ADE Season 12 Reading Schedule

Elementary Geography by Mason (Living Book Press) (Yesterday’s Classics)

The New World at Home by Kirby (revised by North)

The New World at Home Geography Pictures by North (also available as a discounted bundle with The New World at Home)

The Guyot Geographical Reader by Pratt

World Atlas – search by ISBN number to get the correct edition: 9780760793091

Heidi by Spiri

ADE’s Form 1A Map Questions

ADE’s Geography Across the Forms handout

ADE’s Out-of-Door Geography in the Early Years through Form 1 handout

Kinetic Sand

ADE on YouTube

Emily
Welcome to A Delectable Education, the podcast that spreads the feast of the Charlotte Mason Method. I’m Emily Kiser and I’m here with…

Nicole
…Nicole Williams…

Liz
…and Liz Cottrill.

Emily
And today we are going to look at formal Geography lessons in the first few years of school. Form 1 is a group of grades, years one through three, when children are between the ages of six and nine. 

So Nicole, can you give us a picture of what students cover in their Geography lessons at this age? 

Nicole
Yes. In Form one, Geography takes its first steps indoors. Everything they’ve been doing up to now has been out of doors and that will continue, but now we’re gonna add a couple of books to that so they can really meet the wider world on the page. 

Now in Form 1B they get a book here that is an overview of different peoples and places around the world and it really paints the picture of what the child’s day is like, from the child’s perspective at least. So there’s a little bit of a connection there, maybe to places in the far north, or how the herders work their cattle in you know South America. So kind of far places, but the connection is kind of something the child can look at from their own point of view. 

Then in Form 1A, so this is your second and third grade, which is still Form 1, but there’s gonna be a change here. We use a book that works through the world in a more orderly way, beginning close to home with the child’s own country and then their continent and then out to the rest of the world. And this is just a first pass through some of this stuff and they will come back to all these places later on.

There is one thing that I want to point out, and that is where our plan varies from what Charlotte Mason did. And that is because we don’t live in England and you may not live where we live. So the principle we see going through all of this is the child starts from their own backyard and their own country or even their region and country and continent and goes out from there. So we have to make some changes depending on where we live.

Emily
When you said we vary from Charlotte Mason, you don’t mean what she did, but you mean specifically what book she used. 

Nicole
Right. Maybe her specific assigned book, versus the principal being the same in both cases, right? 

Emily
Yep.

Nicole
So the second book that these Form 1 students would read was really a Physical Geography type of book. Charlotte Mason wrote one herself that is called Elementary Geography, and it runs through all three years of Form 1, and it really takes the things the child met outdoors, and now it lays them out in an orderly way such as how the earth turns, why we have seasons, that the sun rises in the east, how a flat map can stand in for a round world and things like that that they have already experience with, but now it’s going to very clearly explain some of those things to them. And because they’ve seen them firsthand it’ll be easier for them. 

And then there is the map work. So it’s still staying very concrete at this age. In Form 1B the child is still going to describe boundaries of a field that they know well. They’re gonna make a few landform shapes, maybe in sand, like an island, a mountain, a river. They may draw simple plans of familiar places by pacing them off with their own feet. 

Then in Form 1A, so again, this is your second and third grade student, they’re gonna begin answering six simple questions from the map before each reading. So that’s their first map questions. 

Emily
Yeah. It’s a wide program, even at this earliest stage. 

So for the lesson format, they have two fifteen minute lessons a week in all through all three years of Form 1. And then of course some of their experiments or observations might happen in their outdoor nature time or whatever.

They might do some of the pacing assignments that they have before they start drawing a map to scale. They might have to pace some of those walks in the afternoon because you’re not gonna go out, you know, on a walk down a couple of different roads in your 15 minute Geography lesson in the middle of the morning. 

Liz
Pretty tough. 

Emily
And they might need to know the sunrise and sunset. So obviously that’s not happening in that specific 15 minutes on your timetable. And of course then they can also work more on their compass skills, which all of these things are fun. We do a lot of them with our nature club, but some of the things are just different times of day, obviously, because that’s the world we live in. 

So one lesson, one of those 15-minute lessons is for the Geography reader, which except for the 1B reader that Nicole mentioned, that Geography reader is the one that has the map questions, like you said. So you would answer the six questions from the atlas before doing the reading for the day. And I’ll talk about that in a minute. 

And then the other lesson is for Charlotte Mason’s physical Geography book, which is Elementary Geography. Those are very few lessons spread over the term. So there is plenty of time to also do all of those other tasks you were talking about, like building the landforms or describing boundaries, or even a trip that a parent took. You might tell a story, an oral lesson of a trip that you took and maybe show some pictures, and that becomes part of your child’s experience, their knowledge bank as well.

So there’s time in that second lesson to do both of those things. So Form 1B, their readings in either of their books are just like most other read and narrate lessons. They might look at a picture or a diagram and discuss after they’ve read it, but you know, you’re gonna set up the lesson, recap what happened before, give them some little tidbit to excite their interest, read, and then allow them to narrate before bringing in anything else. 

But then it changes a little bit with the Form 1A starting their map questions. Those, I mean, I call this the only non-negotiable in Charlotte Mason’s Geography lessons. There’s so much latitude for all kinds of things that you could bring in depending on your own experience and your child’s, you know, your cultural heritage, your friends who you know who might live in a different place, all kinds of things like that you can bring in as it makes sense to you. There’s no formula, in other words, but the one non-negotiable is these six map questions must be answered before the reading. And that’s from the Geography reader, as I mentioned. 

So your overall goal of these map questions, I just want to read this quote to kind of set the stage of why Charlotte Mason thought these were so important. She said that map questions are used…actually it’s not Charlotte Mason, it’s Agnes Drury, who wrote why they did what they did in their program. She said: 

Map questions are used at the beginning of each lesson, that a thorough knowledge of the latitude, coastline, mountains, and so on may give grounds for deducing the climate, the product, the habits of the people. 

This is where you take all of that stored information and then, okay, if I look at what this latitude of this other country that I’m looking at, I’m gonna know some things about it because it’s going to relate or not relate to where we live, right? So it’s really teaching them how to read a map.

And it’s not comprehension questions. This is not a quiz. They are looking at the atlas while you’re asking the questions, but I liken it to a object lesson in nature study where when you are asked a question, your eye has to track to that part. And what that’s doing is helping them take in the information, learning how to digest information that they get from this map, and then also travel all the way through it and fix that into their own mind’s eye.

So they can then read their Geography reader and those questions should illuminate the reading. Like they’re not just arbitrary, hey, we’re gonna ask six map questions. It should be the map of the region that is going to come into their reading. If there’s a river that’s mentioned, you’re gonna have looked at it and where it flows and its name so that when they hear it in the reading, that kinda lights up that map in their mind and they can picture what they’re hearing. They’re connected. 

Nicole
Yes.

Emily
So then they narrate their reading and afterwards you might tell about your own travels there if you’ve been to such and such a place. If they’re starting with their own country and continent, it’s very likely that you have been to some of the places they’re going to read up. You might even pull up a picture or two as time allows, and that’s the format of their lessons. 

So as far as teacher prep, you need to find some maps, and depending on the resource that you use, you may need to write map questions. And I really do encourage you, if you’re going to write your own map questions, to really study the map questions that Charlotte Mason included in her Geography readers, because that is going to, it’s very different than this is the capital, this is the biggest city. It’s much more those physical features because that’s what’s going to help them make those deductions about what life in climate and culture might be in other places.

You might also think about finding a picture or two to show maybe something was described that they have no context for and you really want to you know come up with a picture of how you know how tall the giant red woods really are and find a picture of a person standing next to such a tall tree or something like that. And be prepared to share about your own travels. So think about, oh yeah I’ve been here; maybe I’ll pull out a picture from that trip or just think about something that might interest them that you could share to connect with that.

So as far as resources, the book that Charlotte Mason used was very outdated during her lifetime, and she still used it until it could not be acquired anymore. And it is very…it meets the children exactly where they are. And so thankfully we do have a New World at Home, which is an updated, revised version of a portion of that book. And it’s published by Charlotte Mason Beehive. 

And that is what we recommend starting out with. It’s kind of the gold standard. After that went out of print for good, you see her stumbling around trying like one or two terms in many, many different books, never finding what exactly she wanted. It also talks about the plants and the animals that live in these different places and that was just so important to her. 

And then I really do recommend this portion of that Charlotte Mason Beehive curriculum. She has Geography pictures. And these show what those interesting different animals look like or, you know, a dog sled in the far north or what a laplander’s tent would be like or something like that. So it really helps them imagine and picture what those things are. So that is a really helpful resource that I do love to recommend. 

Of course, Charlotte Mason’s first Geography book has been reprinted as Elementary Geography. There’s many different editions of this. This one is just happens to be from Living Book Press, but there’s many others. So that’s read for all three years of Form 1. 

And then in North America for Americans, and also I think it does work a bit for Canadians because our countries are most of the time connected and have a relationship with one another, we have used The Guyot Geographical Reader by Mary Pratt. It does exactly the same scope that Charlotte Mason’s book does, but from an American context. So it first covers the United States and then it covers our continent and then it moves to all the other continents in turn. And it’s about the same quantity of material. 

And then we have created map questions for that resource, and so it breaks it down into lessons so you’ll know what pages to read. And here are the map questions that go ahead of that reading. So we have that available on our website, and that’ll be linked in the show notes as well. 

And of course, you need a good atlas. This is my favorite, it is out of print, and it can be hard to get the correct edition unless you search by ISBN number. I have never received the wrong edition. I bought probably 10 of these in you know for the library, for myself, for other people. And it has…if you search by publication year or publisher, it’s really hard to find. But if you go by ISBN, I’ve never gotten the wrong one by going that way. The one I like and what we use for our map questions is the newly expanded US section. 

And I just want to show you briefly why I love this atlas so much. It very much focuses on the physical geography. So the landform. So here’s one with no political boundaries, just some names of rivers and mountains and things like that. And then it will have the political, but it does still retain those physical features. And when you really study Charlotte Mason’s map questions, you realize how important that was. And then of course we get a bit more of a focused look at each region of the United States in this edition that I like. 

So you’re always welcome to vary the questions if your atlas that you’re using doesn’t have all of that information. That was something Charlotte Mason had, and her maps were very simple and published in her books. So it’s not like you need a ton of detail. And actually, a ton of detail is harder for young students to read. So that is just something that I think really helps, is having a good atlas. 

We also have a link in the show notes to our Geography across the forms document that just shows what Charlotte Mason did. Again, we’re not recommending those same books unless you’re in England and you wanna follow her scope and sequence. But what is really helpful in that document is it lists the map activities that you were talking about. So it tells you which landforms to build or, you know, to how many fields you need to describe the boundaries of or whatever. And then the pacing and making plans work that they do in Form 1A. So that is all itemized in that document. 

And I will just say one other thing. So she always says “in a tray of sand”– this is something I love to use kinetic sand for. Slightly less messy than just straight up sand but it retains its shape and it’s really easy, and I just have them keep it in a tray with a movable lid and so they’ll either put it on the lid to make a thing or they’ll do it in the actual bucket. But that’s what we like to use for our landform work.

Liz
One thing maybe we should point out too is that there have been several different printings of Charlotte Mason’s Geography. 

Emily
Elementary Geography. 

Liz
Elementary Geography, yeah. Some of them include questions, but those were not her method for…they weren’t included. 

Emily
They’re more like traditional comprehension questions at the end of a chapter. So we do not recommend using those. 

Liz
Those are not the same as the map questions either. 

Emily
Right.

Liz
Just to be clear about that. Because that is a little bit of a question or problem that people run into. 

Emily
Sure. 

Liz
I would say the most asked question by moms of children this age is how can the students find these things on the map when they cannot read? And I would just say it takes some effort on your part to maybe not always use the names, just describe– can you find on the eastern coast a big bay with mountains to the west? or whatever, you know, so just use words instead of names.

They can still absolutely find those things. And they can learn the directions of the map, north, south, east, and west, without having to read. And they can point to, I see a river here. And then you can simply say what it is. I think this is a lot like Science with Geography, just as the teacher, to just always use the right names for things. Don’t worry about defining everything. Just say, Well, you see where this little peninsula sticks out here and things like that. 

Emily
Yeah, because when you understand the goal of map questions is to fix that map in their mind and not to have memorized all these facts, then it really becomes incidental what the name is, right? 

Liz
Yeah, and I remember taking a grandchild out, not even one of Emily’s children, and for their birthday and they were holding a cup with a plastic lid that had melted a little bit funny. And he said, Oh my goodness, look it Grandma, it looks just like the Bay of Biscay. And I was like, Yeah, that is not something the average seven year old knows.

So another question a lot of times too is if you have a child who’s, say, in third grade, this is very common, and then you start a first grader, how do you combine them? Can you join them together for their Geography lesson? Absolutely, you can do that. And a child does not have to start out with the same book about places around the world in order to…yeah, they can start out with map questions at six and that’s fine. 

Emily
Yeah. I just don’t require them to answer all of the map questions like my third grader. You know, they’re still learning those. 

Liz
And then later on they you know, at another year they could go back and do those things. 

Emily
They won’t miss it. It’ll just go in a different order. 

Liz
And actually it’s even more fun usually to have more than one child looking on the map for the answers. Sometimes it speeds things up a little bit too. And just don’t forget that they’re gonna pick up a lot of these ideas just in the books that they’re reading as you know, family read-alouds – reading Heidi, I suddenly knew exactly all kinds of things about the Alps, you know, and what what grew there, what animals were there, and things like that. So Geography incidentally comes into all kinds of subjects. 

Emily
That’s so true.

Thanks for listening today. We hope you’ll tune in next week as we continue our look at Geography lessons in a Charlotte Mason education by turning our attention to Form 2, which is grades four through six, as they become even more acquainted with the world around them.