A home education post – Geography

I have noticed G is sooo much calmer now Christmas has past and so for next year I resolve that the whole of December will be a holiday month!

So, today’s “lesson” started off with nuts. We had some nuts in their shells that we hadn’t eaten at Christmas, mainly because we didn’t have a nutcracker so couldn’t be bothered! So I did a bit of research about the nuts we had, walnuts, hazelnuts, and almonds. Interestingly I found out almonds are a member of the genus Prunus, which includes apricots, nectarines, and peaches among other fruits, but the flesh of the almond is leathery. So it is actually a culinary nut rather than a botanical nut. Actually a number of nuts are culinary nuts rather than botanical nuts. But there’s too much info about nuts to go in here! I also researched where they grow.

As I suspected, the prospect of cracking open nuts with a hammer (obviously wrapped in a tea towel) greatly appealed to a four year old! So he got to shake them and describe them before letting me hammer them open. Then he ate them while we talked about what they grow on, why they are so hard to get into, that they are sources of protein etc. and the thing that interested him most, finding where they grow in an atlas.

After that he wanted to know where other things came from so we investigated clothing tags and looked at those countries on a map. I think the most interesting had to be his undies, which were all purchased in America. He got four pairs and they were all from a different country, the Philippines, Thailand, the Dominican Republic, and El Salvador.

Then he got out the atlas with the cd-rom in it and answered some questions on that about rivers, and used the index to find things using the reference letters and numbers.

I almost bought a big wall map in a cheap book shop yesterday, I might get it when I’m in town tomorrow, I think it would be good to stick little pictures of clothes etc. on where they come from. Hmmm… must buy blu-tac too!