World geography seems to be something that is overlooked in my house for my younger students. Over the past few weeks, my elementary kids have been helping me with this review by using the geography curriculum for kids called Let’s Go Geography.
Let’s Go Geography is a program that is accessible online, where you are able to print out the PDFs of lesson plans for each week. The PDFs are internet-linked, and often refer users to websites to view videos, listen to audio, view pictures, and more. There are plenty of hands-on projects and crafts for kids to complete in relation to whichever country is being studied that week.
When you log in to your Member Home Page after purchasing the curriculum, you have access to all of the lessons for the year. Currently, we have access to the first year, but this is actually the first out of THREE years of geography that will be offered. The lessons do not go in order by continent, so your students will be traveling from place to place all around the globe each year that they go through the lesson plans.
Let’s Go Geography is intended for students in Kindergarten-4th Grade, but I wouldn’t hesitate to use it with a preschooler or older elementary student as well. This curriculum works especially well in a group or multi-student setting. You would simply need to print out the amount of materials needed so each student could work on it for themselves.
This program is set to be used as completing one lesson/country per week. After every 8 lessons, a break week is incorporated. Review is built into the program as well. In fact, on Week 35, there is a Year 1 in Review to review all of the countries studied!
The schedule is flexible. I know that one of my kids could do a country a day if I let him. However, with my younger students, one per week is plenty. You could complete the entire thing as written, or just pick and choose activities that work for your family. You could split it up between several days a week, or just devote a good chunk of time to complete it all at once each week.
Here is an overview of the program:
We chose to jump around a bit. When we signed up, we did begin getting weekly emails reminding us of each scheduled country and the work we were to complete. However, it is flexible.
We chose countries based on my kids’ interest. For example, they wanted to check out Colombia after we received a subscription food box last month based off of that country. We decided to go ahead and work on one country per week, including Canada, Finland, Colombia, Iceland, and Chile. Colombia was definitely their favorite of the ones we finished!
Each country has a similar set up and length. The Colombia lesson is a 35 page PDF. It begins by giving students some insight into the country by giving the population, language(s) spoken, continent it is on, the capital, largest city, and size in miles.
There is also a mapping activity that ties into the Printable Passport if your child wants to make a little passport of their own to keep track of all of the countries they’ve “visited” during their coursework.
There is an itinerary for the trip for kids, too. It’s a colorful checklist that they can check off as they complete the projects and research within that country’s lesson and ideas.
I love how the program brings in information about the different countries’ flags, music, culture, landscape, industries, and more. It is loaded with beautiful full color pictures to support the information presented, and links to plenty of further research and resources. The crafts that are suggested have very thorough instructions, including pictures of what it should look like through each step.
If you like notebooking pages, each country has a notebooking page. We used that page for some copywork from some of the information given in the lesson.
There are coloring pages. There’s information about finding out more through books at the library. You really can teach this information to students no matter how they learn. It was good for my hyper kindergartner and my calmer 2nd grader. My older kids enjoyed learning and doing the craft projects, as well. This was an engaging program for all of my kids.
Let’s Go Geography is very flexible. You can get a full year’s access, a semester at a time, or even pick and choose individual lessons. If you’re looking for a fun world geography curriculum for your homeschool or co-op, I recommend checking this one out! It is quite easy to use, hits all of the different learning styles, and helps students to really understand a lot of information about each country they study.
