History and Geography Meme#143: Cultural Geography

When I went to school, geography consisted of memorizing all the countries or capitals on a map. I remember spending my entire 7th grade memorizing all the countries in the Middle East and their capitals. Of course, many of those have changed since the 1970's. That is why I have taken a different approach to our geography studies.

Oh, sure, we still use maps, and we learn about the landforms on those maps, but it is the people I want my students to learn about.

The maps just help to facilitate learning about the people, maps are not an activity unto themselves. We look at them to learn about the where of this area of the world's study and we look at the landforms in terms of how they have affected the people.

We learn about the religion and other things that have influenced how the people think.

We learn about their culture through the foods they eat,

the clothing they wear,

the holidays they celebrate,

the art they make.

It is not necessarily all hands-on,

but it is the discussions we have that is at the heart of our studies, and sometimes that is hard to show in pictures.
How do you do your geography studies?

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What history and geography studies have you been doing?

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