I love geography and when I saw someone sensorially showing an island and a lake, I was just amazed. What I have read in textbooks is so demonstrated concrete to children. At the same time, had a question - why? do they need to learn geography so early? Yes, they do have an absorbent mind, but still, is it needed though? Then I got fascinated by puzzle maps, continents, countries, flags, reading them...But then I did not see much of this work being done in the classroom in my first year...
During my third year, I started making reading labels for a few continents and still wondering where is the interest- Slowly, in few years after reading and after having a few conversations with one of my mentors, I started getting the picture a little clearer- I am only going to share what I have learnt from these materials and what is better to focus from my side...
- By starting from land and water forms, we give a vision of the whole. This vision is interesting because it can be seen as very concrete by the child. This is taken in along with the child's imagination. As the whole appeals more interesting, a child may or may not wish to know its details. Thus, they begin to understand the finer portions of details.
- The concept of WHOLE is given only to kindle interest and appeal in a grand manner to children. As a guide, this is the point of interest to follow the child to help them understand the next level of details.
- When it comes to the globe, it helps children realise something they hear often like the world, countries, to group the ideas that they have listened to in conversations - where children have families accustomed to travelling. - Here is the biggest reminder for me to have conversations about travel to understand what the child has experienced so far, instead of merely giving globes as a simple presentation.
- When these children have experiences of listening/travelling and know all these geographical elements, the material makes more sense to help them organize all these ideas in a very orderly manner.
- Otherwise, I see the puzzle maps as an aid to help children discriminate irregular shapes of different colours - the child who has experience of discriminating regular shapes and colours has progressed to applying that knowledge at a different level. So the whole point of interest is shifted here from understanding countries to visually discriminate shapes and seen as an intellectual activity to build intelligence -(not to do anything more with a real understanding of countries)
- Still, as with other material, after enough experience names or rather nouns have to be given (not seen as a learning outcome for geography) in these classified ways, children just acquire words that are new. Slowly they are not new words but become a part of them and help build a child's repository of words- this may gradually help them to understand later when they read- So giving words here, I see as similar to naming objects
When the children were walking on the line doing the exercise with flags made of pieces of coloured paper in their hands, one of the flags was the flag of one of the countries. The children asked for flags of different countries, which we gave them. Many of these flags are sensorially stiking and easily recognisable because they have symbols which are special to various counties. The arms in the Italian flag, the Swastika in the German, the sickle in the Russian, the funny rectangles in the English. and the various stars in the American - these special differences seen in the flags were attractive to the children. So we made another glove on which each nation was of a different colour, which has no other distincton except the border limits of these nations. The children were asked to pin each flag in the map of the country to which it belonged.
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