Geography Games

One of the things that we love about homeschooling is that the kids can follow their interests. Lately, Thomas has been playing a geography game on the Kindle. This has helped his reading skills and he has very quickly learned a lot about geography. One day as I was watching him, he got the question, "Which of these countries borders Peru?" He wasn't sure, so he asked me. I told him that the correct answer was Colombia. At first, he was a bit unsure of that answer. He was looking at an outline of Peru, so I pointed to where Colombia touches it. He said, "Oh, yeah. And Venezuela is here, Brazil is here, Ecuador is here, and Bolivia is here," pointing to the corresponding area for each of those countries. "And one more, at the bottom," I said. "Oh, and Chile right here," he responded.

On another occasion, I don't remember what the question was, but he was playing in the Asia category. He wasn't sure what the answer was, so I said, "Well, is such-and-such in Asia?" "No, it's here," he said, pointing to a certain part of an imaginary map in the air in front of him. "And what about such-and-such?" I asked. Again, he pointed to the corresponding place on his imaginary world map. By doing this one more time, we were able to use the process of elimination to come to the correct answer.

A side benefit of playing this game is that it is helping his reading skills. In fact, he has recently gone from always reading aloud to often reading the trivia questions in his head as he plays the game. Here is a video of him playing the trivia game:

In the video, he does not get all the questions right. When he gets questions about flags, he often runs to our world map that is on the wall, because it shows the national flag of each country. Sometimes, though, he just takes a guess instead.

In addition to the trivia game, he also plays a map game. He started with South America, and before we knew it, he knew every country in South America. In fact, one game that he plays drops the countries Tetris-style, and he can pick them all out with any orientation. He then moved on to Asia. The first couple of times that he played, he could only score 10 or so points. He asked me to help him, and together we scored somewhere in the neighborhood of 45 points. It occurred to me that I had probably caused a problem by setting a high score that he would not be able to surpass, but by the next day, he had beaten it, and as you can see in the following video, he can now correctly locate every country in Asia.

Not only can he get them all correct, but it only took him a minute and a half. There are 47 countries; the game allows three mistakes before ending, and you get a ten-point bonus for each of the three mistakes that you do not make. That is why he ends up with 77 points.

I used to think that music was the secret to learning. I thought, "People can memorize anything if you set it to a catchy tune." I still think that, but I am much more amazed by the power of games.