July 2010 Meeting Summary

Today's Geography Club meeting went smoothly. Some of the kids found it challenging, but I don't think there is anything that is too challenging.

We started the meeting with each child identifying as many of the 50 states as possible. They were given a map of the United States with each of the states numbered. On a separate sheet of paper, they were to write the name of the state by number. Abbreviations could be used and spelling doesn't count. We will do this at the beginning of each meeting and we are looking for improvement each time.



After that, we talked briefly why God would want us to study geography. When I asked the kids, their answers included
"If we learn about animals in our area, we could also learn about animals in other areas."
"God wants us to know about His creation."

I read through a list of 10 reasons why God wants us to study geography from the Encyclopedia of Bible Truths on School Subjects (Personal note: This is a book I highly recommend to parents for those times when kids say "why do we have to learn this anyway." There is scripture to back up all of the points made in the book.)

We went on to learn about the state quarter program. Most of the materials we used were from the US Mint. We played a game where each child was given a state quarter and a card with a state capital on it. A child would read the card that might say "Who has Harrisburg". The child with the correct quarter would raise his hand and say, "I have Pennsylvania!"



We took extra time to look at Pennsylvania's quarter and really look at all the details on it.



We then talked about Letterboxing and plans for our group to do Letterboxing projects for this year.

We concluded the meeting with some questions from the National Geographic Bee. I explained that even if you don't know the answer directly, you can take what you do know and apply it to come up with the right answer. I really like this bee because it requires thinking skills. We did a few practice questions, going slowly discussing how we could get to the correct answer.

Homework was handed out and the meeting was adjourned.

In the next week, I will attempt to post resources that we used. If I am unable to post them to this blog, I will email participants directly.