I'm Sonia Schaefer with Simply Charlotte Mason. Geography in a Charlotte Mason education is not just

giving your student a list of gross national products or capital cities to memorize. Charlotte's

vision for a geography lesson is that it should offer your students an opportunity to connect

with fellow human beings who live in a different

part of the world. Geography lessons should take your students there. Here's how to accomplish

that. You need two things to teach geography, maps and living narratives about the regions that you're studying.

The maps should be detailed enough for your students to explore the nooks and crannies of the region. And the narratives should contain enough description

that your students can picture that region in their imaginations

as they read about it.

Maps and living narratives.

That's what you need.

Now, how do you use them?

The first step in a Charlotte Mason Geography

lesson is the map work. This part of the lesson helps your students form their own mental

map of the region. And it's done by using guided map questions. Let's say you're studying Europe.

And for this lesson, you're going to zoom into Southern Europe.

All right, give your students a map of Southern Europe and then guide their focus as they

look at it using questions such as, what body of water lies between Greece and Turkey? What is the name of

the hand-shaped peninsula off southern Greece? And by the way, this is a great way to

naturally learn geographical terms. If your students don't know what a peninsula is,

here's an opportunity to define it in context.

You might ask, what countries lie to the north of Greece?

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