5 Ways to Make Geography Fun for Kids

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With the internet opening up the world like never before, the need for our kids to understand the world is growing right alongside it. Whether we like it or not, we live in an increasingly global community, so the need to teach our kids geography and world cultures becomes more and more important every day.

Fortunately, there are many ways to make geography fun for kids and inspire a love for learning more about this amazing world we live in.

Is there a single best way to teach geography?

Regardless of what geography curriculum you use, geography is about much more than just finding places on maps, learning to recognize various country flags, and memorizing unusual vocabulary terms. Geography should be much more than that—and as their teachers, we should be finding ways to make geography fun for our kids!

After teaching geography for several years to elementary ages, I’ve narrowed the key essentials down to these:

5 Ways to Make Geography Fun for Kids

First, geography should introduce actual countries using good books or the internet. This takes geography from abstract ideas to concrete people and places that kids can relate to. Have your kids learn about countries from the same continent before moving on to another continent. This helps keep your child’s frame of reference in place and avoids confusion!

Second, keep geography lessons short. You want your kids to get familiar with the culture and landscape, including unique plants and animals, without getting overwhelmed. Hit the highlights. If you are using a fact-based book, look at the pictures and read the captions and the bits of information in bold print.

For younger kids, skip the government and history sections unless there’s an obvious reason not to. Keep it fun and fascinating.

Third, do some short activities with flags and maps. Learning about flags can be a colorful way to make geography fun, and maps provide an opportunity to point out new geography words and definitions in an engaging way.

Here are a few activities you can do:

Find the Equator and show why some countries are warm and some are not.
Explain the Ring of Fire when your country is a part of it and draw it in.
Point out an archipelago when your theme country has that.
Play “I Spy” with clues that use the words north, south, east, and west.

Have your kids write about what they’ve learned. (If your child is younger, you can write down what he or she dictates to you.) What do the children remember from the books you’ve looked at or the pictures you’ve seen? What did they think was most fascinating about this country? What were their favorite animals? Would they want to live in this place, and why or why not? Again, keep it short and simple.

Last, a hands-on craft or project is always fun. Kids could color a coloring page or make a craft based on some unique feature related to the country they’re studying. Writing the name of the country on the project also helps them remember things they’ve learned. For instance, this continent map stitching activity is a hands-on way to help them remember the shapes and outlines of the continents.

You can also make geography fun by letting your kids learn all about various seasonal activities around the world. Depending on what time of year it is, check out this around-the-world traditions printable booklet series from our sister site, Only Passionate Curiosity:

Teaching geography includes maps, but it is much more than maps. The world is a big place, and kids should understand that many languages, cultures, and surroundings are far different from their own.

Exploring the world through geography should be an exciting adventure to share with your child, and these ways to make geography fun will hopefully help you all learn together.