Once upon a time, back before Facebook and Twitter even existed, I homeschooled the old fashioned way. I used email Yahoo groups to connect with other homeschool moms in my area and we shared a little teacher’s lounge online and helped each other with projects. One of those projects was a fun IN-REAL-LIFE spiral notebook with all the States in the USA. We gathered up one person from each state who wanted to participate in a post card mailing project and we all shared our addresses. Each participant purchased enough post cards for EVERY state to get one of each state, and we printed our labels (the mean teacher moms made our students write out the addresses by hand – ahem)… and we watched with delight as our kids filled up their state books with gorgeous postcards from every single state. Truly, if you want a real geography project, this can only be beat by ACTUALLY VISITING these places yourself.
Now days, though, and especially if you have elementary kids who are not so keen on writing, need some keyboard practice, and are more in to instant gratification… Facebook friends are the way to go! I asked my Facebook friends where they all were from this week – city and state, and they shared this info with me so I could make a crude map (no personal info – just initials for a pin-point on the map).
Here was my result (and the pins keep updating as we add them):
Sorry about the ads, as it was a free mapping service! I bet you can click over and look at it…
My boys were especially interested in the “people who live in the ocean”… HA! It made for some fun Google Searches for photos of Guam and discussions about what islands are and why we have other territories besides our original fifty states. It is also fun to have a visual map of your friends for planning ROAD TRIPS. Ahem…
But that is a story for another sunny, California day…
Another really cool thing you can do with your state map? You can highlight regions. I highlighted the states my younger boys have been to. I’ve been to around 26 myself, and my big kids have been to at least 3/4 that many. The youngest two boys that I’m still doing school with haven’t traveled near as much as their older siblings (well, I don’t let them count the trips they took before they started Kindergarten).
Are you my Facebook Friend? Pop over and like my page! I’ll share my Friend Map on there, also. The boys are enjoying helping me add pins to the map. It doubles as computer lab, too – because they have to learn to navigate tabs on my internet browser and work the mouse properly. I love killing more than one bird with one stone when it comes to school subjects.
This sounds like a fun thing for kids to do.