What is the cumulative effect of a full Geography education? We’re discussing Charlotte Mason’s goals and expectations for students in Forms 5-6, what we call high school or grades 10-12, in today’s podcast episode.
Listen Now:
Charlotte Mason, Volume 6 (Amazon) (Living Book Press – use code DELECTABLE for 10% off!)
ADE Season 12 Reading Schedule
ADE’s Europe Guides
Prisoners of Geography by Marshall
Power of Geography by Marshall
Be Expert with Map and Compass by Kjellström
Carpenter’s New Geographical Readers
*Out of print; try searching on used book sites like BookFinder.com
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…
Liz
…Liz Cottrill…
Nicole
…and Nicole Williams.
Emily
Forms 5-6, what we call grades, or other countries call years, 10 through 12, really pulls all of their students’ Geography knowledge together as they engage in their own location and continue to cover all the rest of the world.
Nicole, would you describe their course of study at these ages?
Nicole
Yes. So first, we still have our stream of Pictorial Geography. And these years are for the continents the student hasn’t studied yet up to this point. For example, if your student studied the European continent in Form 3 and 4, you could now cover Asia or Africa, you know, one of the other continents.
This is a place that we can kind of go beyond what Miss Mason was able to assign, her students got a fairly quick two-year survey of all the continents at once, partly because in her day, huge stretches of Africa and South America were still barely charted.
Emily
Yeah.
Nicole
And we also have far more…like I want to say Geography, more Geography now, but that sounds silly because it was all there
Emily
We didn’t know what it was.
Nicole
We have some more to work with.
Emily
Like the middle of the ocean floor right now.
Nicole
Exactly, exactly.
But then also we live in a far more international world now too, at least in the sense that we’re more daily up on what’s going on in different places. So instead of a quick survey, we can actually give each remaining continent its own fuller reader and really settle into that for a time.
So depending on where you live and what you’ve already covered, you can order them however it best suits your family. There’s not anything strict here. And also I’d note that the aim isn’t to touch every last country in the whole world, but really to just carry them more in depth across as much of the world as we can at this point.
Emily
Right.
Nicole
Their second book was their Physical Geography. And this deepens to back in Form 3, it became a formal study of its own at this time where the child had their own book to do their work from. And now they’re gonna take up a more scientific Physical Geography. It just matures more.
It’s just funny to me to think about where they’ve come from. Like where does the sunrise? And now they’re just really gonna continue working through exercises, experiments, things like that to learn more about how these things work.
And then third is the map work. And two things happen to map work here. First is that in Form 5, so starting in grade 10, the student no longer answers map questions the way we’ve done it up to now. Instead, everything they read gets summarized on a map of their own and drawn from memory.
And then, second, the–
Emily
Did I hear everything? Everything?
Nicole
Everything, everything they read. I wondered about that.
Second, the map skill matures into something very practical at this point. So, Miss Mason’s students learned surveying at this stage, which is so cool to think of them using tools and really a skill of learning. Like it just takes it to a whole–
Emily
Can you imagine, because most of the students in Charlotte Mason’s schools at this level were girls because boys had moved on to university or something else, trade school or whatever. And I’m just picturing their Edwardian dress, like long skirts traipsing around with their surveyors. Surveyor material.
Nicole
I just love it. I love it. It’s still good, but there’s something else that we recommend that may be more practical, and that is learning to read and navigate with a map and compass. It’s something that you would be able to use in hiking or orienteering, which there are like whole clubs who do orienteering stuff. The students also give an account of the physiography of their own neighborhood with their own drawings, which is another cool full circle thing from those little chalk drawings or dust drawings to now they’re doing the full map of their region with you said it’s not just the boundaries and stuff but what crops are grown and what’s happening in that area.
Emily
And buildings and roads and all that stuff.
Nicole
Yeah.
There’s still Current Events, what’s going on in the news and their history reading and they’re using atlases to place it. This is like adult stuff, you know?
Emily
Yes. Yeah, exactly. And we have some books that I’ll mention that really help…I just feel like it fits them to be citizens of the world, right? All this knowledge I have is not just for his own sake, but is to help inform me and help me understand why…like Geopolitics, which is as Tim Marshall would say, everything about where you live and what your country is all about Geography.
And still, since I read his book, The Prisoners of Geography, which we recommend for this level as one of their Pictorial Geography books, I have understood every current event in such a different way from those. I mean literally his subtitle is “Ten Maps That Explain Everything About Our World”. And that was not an oversell, that subtitle. It has helped so much.
Nicole
It reminds me too of how we say when people travel, it changes them.
Emily
Yeah.
Nicole
You become more compassionate and more humble and you kind of know your place in the world compared to somebody else’s. And outside of going to all these places, I feel like this curriculum has given them that travel experience. It’s in their imagination, but it’s done that same work.
Emily
So they still have three lessons a week, but they’re all now 30 minutes instead of…they don’t have that 10 minutes map exercises lesson at this age. They just get three 30 minute lessons and you’ve laid out all the different kinds of books. There’s a lot of latitude and it really is going to depend on what your student’s focus is, like their experience, where they find themselves, what you’ve done previously, that you might make different choices about those types of books.
So their Geography reader, again, as you said, they’re not answering the map questions, even though it might have it. Like the Geography reader that they started in Form 4 does have questions for all the lessons, but they wouldn’t do those once they get to Form 5. Rather, they ought to know by now how to use maps, and they’re now being required to use them. Summarize all their reading with maps. So that’s probably gonna look like just a part of their narration is going to be a sketch map of what they read, or something to jog their memory to show that they’re understanding the actual location relationship between places from their books.
So their Geography reader and then their travel tales. We do recommend Prisoners of Geography over three years. Maybe they read it more quickly. He’s got several others like The Power of Geography might be another one. Those are very relevant. I love giving at this age. It just feels like you’re preparing them to go out and be thinkers and voters and compassionate people.
And then Physical Geography. I usually assign a book that is like the orienteering and not so much like understanding the science behind it. I think they get that a lot in their high school Earth Sciences too, but there’s just so much to read and so little time to do it at this time. And then they would just use maps in conjunction with every other subject as well, right? So not just their Geography lessons are they going to be pulling out maps or drawing sketch maps, like you might need to do that for your History, or you know, definitely your Current Events.
And I love that current events at this age, because they were in Form 3 and 4 as well. But now she says they must know something about the countries coming most under notice. So they’re really keeping up with the news, they’re understanding a lot more, and those things like right now we would be to knowing something about Iran and Israel and Ukraine and Russia and Argentina and Venezuela or whatever the case may be, but those things that keep coming up in the news cycle to know more about that instead of, and I think that’s a way of caring, right? Instead of just hearing these things or memorizing talking points or feeling like we know all about something because we just hear the same little sound bites on the news every day. They’re actually supposed to learn something more about the country from an atlas, studying, or she called it a gazetteer, right? That would have a little more facts about the country as well.
So all these books, all these lessons are going to have a similar format of recapping obviously what they read before, reading, narrating, and then making these sketch maps that are part of their narration. And then discuss. So this is the time to have those conversations with your students. It might not happen in the lesson, but you’re going to have to be talking about these things as you go, as you hear a news story, as you go about your day, maybe later, as you’re driving to someplace with your kids in the car.
And like I said, like you’ll notice that I just gave you a very loose sketch. There is plenty of latitude. Some days you might, as part of your special studies, you might be studying this particular biome and you draw a very detailed physiography of that. I like hope that comes into it, but you see that all Geography is going to pervade all the other subjects as well.
So I think for teacher prep the things that we need to do are mostly be familiar with what they’re reading. These are some really big ideas. And honestly, Charlotte Mason’s fifth Geography reader that you mentioned that just did a it was very inadequate because it we didn’t have a whole lot of information on a lot of these other places. Her overviews of each continent I would still have kids read today. Like I have ideas about my own continent, North and South America, that I never had before reading hers. And it still gives me chills when I think about it. And also instills like that good patriotic pride of like, wow, where I live is amazing.
And she does that for each of the locations. So she had a gift with that. Geography really was…that was her first book she ever wrote was about Geography, even before she wrote about education. But I think it we need to be in understanding sympathy with our students, right? And to help pull them up and really get them to think about these things. These complex issues that are not going to be solved you know, overnight with a few policymakers in a room, you know?
And their work at this level really just needs to, it should prepare them to just continue on with their life, to be engaged with the world around them, to care deeply about people and places and the world that they live in.
So some resources, like you said, depending on what order you did things in, you may have done North and South America in Form 3 and started Europe. So you might be finishing Europe, or maybe you haven’t done that at all, and we do have a European resource. We’re hoping in the next coming years to have Asia and Africa and the Americas as well.
But what we’re mostly using are these old books, but they are written in a style that is very similar to what Charlotte Mason was trying to accomplish, but the difference is that Carpenter was writing these after Charlotte Mason. It’s still old, but it’s after World War One, which is when the whole map of Europe and much of the world, like there is no Ottoman Empire after World War One. And that just changed the whole face of Southeast Asia or Southwest Asia, excuse me. so Carpenter’s New Geographical readers, you can get these online. This one is on Africa. He has one on Asia, he has one in North America, South America, Australia.
So those might be something, and honestly, if your child has been following along with this progression of Geography since their whole education, they are very well equipped to update a lot of these facts. Just assign them that as part of their work as they need to figure out what’s outdated and how is this different. But again, a lot of the history is it’s all historically factual, right? This is how it was, and that still informs a lot of what it is today.
Ok, you’re gonna need atlases for your students to study. You can still use the children’s atlas, but you might wanna invest in a more detailed political map so they can find out where different things are happening from around the world. I do like a physical…I think just pouring over it’s like when I started to learn about birds and I would look through my field guides, trying to find the one brown bird that I saw. And you would just subconsciously take in a lot of other information so that the first time I saw a flock of cedar wax wings, I knew instantly what they were because I had passed that picture many times. So I think browsing in physical atlases can do a similar thing for us.
Like I mentioned this is a book that is it’s a complete orienteering handbook, Be Expert with Map and Compass by Björn Kjellström. I don’t know if I’m saying that correctly, probably not. But this I assign for students to read, but then actually go out and do like practice with orienteering with a map and navigating your way across the landscape. And if you have a desire to make your own.
And then I mentioned The Prisoners of Geography, also The Power of Geography. This is ten maps that reveal the future of our world. This might be one temple back for form six. Just you know, here we are thinking forward to what the world is going to be. By Tim Marshall…they do have some language in them, right?
Nicole
I don’t remember that.
Emily
A little bit that is not gratuitous since he’s a reporter and talking to people. You might want…he’s quoting somebody. So I would if that is going to bother you, suggest that you do a pre-read or whatever, but hopefully students at this age are going to know that they’re going to encounter some crass language out in the world and they should be prepared for that.
So those are the resources that I would have to recommend.
Liz
And what would you say, because a lot of parents are concerned if they bring a child to this method at these ages, but they have not had the background that Nicole talked about.
Emily
Yeah.
Liz
Would you still do a year with say the Europe Guide where they’re learning about map questions and how to read a map question?
Emily
I would probably if they haven’t done them yet, I would have them probably do map questions all the way through. Like if they haven’t ’cause up to this point, what is it at 5? They’ve had map questions for eight years. So I would do the three years.
Liz
And just another common question, you know, is the kids have gotten used to these map questions and now they go away and that is correct. But they still are doing drawings, sketches, map work, probably even more so. So they need a little more time.
Emily
They do.
Liz
To do that.
Emily
But they do have the three lessons and the reader would probably only be one of those days. So they would still have time in the other lessons to do more.
Liz
So you already addressed this but just to reemphasize that you know using some perhaps out of date texts, that they’re reading narrative books…I actually find this to be an advantage at this age because teenagers like to know it all and they like to know more than the author of this book. So it’s it’s great research practice for them to find out what this country is called today, where is it located and what are its boundaries and what has changed here that is different.
It’s also amazing to me, in parts of the world that there people are still doing the same occupations that they were a thousand years ago.
Emily
Yeah. It’s because of the Geography.
It’s exciting to consider what students are capable of once they’ve finished their education, isn’t it? Consider how well informed your students will be and how much they will care about the world around them – its people and landforms and countries and relationships between them.
Next week, we’re going to wrap up our Geography series and answer some common questions and concerns that we often hear.