Geography

Geography Fun At Home!

We can still all enjoy Geography even if we are all stuck at home.  Try some of these activities and involve all the family!

• Play ‘Name a country’ at the dinner table. Each player takes it in turns to name a country, starting with A, then B, then C, then D, etc. If you get stuck, look through an atlas, or on google and discover a new part of the world!
• Make the game more challenging by doing the same for capital cities and famous landmarks (which can quite tricky!), famous rivers, volcanoes, mountains, seas and so on.
• Or you could name a place or somewhere to visit around Northwich, starting with A, then B, then C etc.
• Design your own country. Give it a name and draw its outline on a big piece of paper; plot its capital city, some exciting landmarks and interesting places to visit. What type of animals and plants can be found in your country? What language is spoken, what food is eaten and what is the national currency?
• Have a look at flags for different countries and then design your own for your own country, what colours will you use?  Will you put a symbol on your flag?
• Play geography mastermind: which member of the family can name the most countries and their capital cities in 60 seconds? Allow different challenge times for children of different ages. 
• Flick through an atlas and look for strange and wonderful place names. Can you pronounce them correctly and find out two facts about them?
• Use the free map on Google Earth to see the world in satellite photo form. Gaze over the landscapes, zoom in and imagine what life is like in the Sahara, the Serengeti or Siberia. Try the new geography guessing game, GeoGuessr, which asks you to guess locations based on images... challenge the whole family!
• Mark all the countries people in your family have been to on a map. How many continents have they visited?
• Using Oddizzi, take a journey through the world by clicking on the green highlighted hyperlinks. Start in your own country and see where you end up in just five clicks (to access the Oddizzi website both the username and the password are charlesdarwin).
• Put together a collection of toy animals. Can you place them on a big map according to where they come from?
• Make the most of the latest phone apps and games – the engaging and very addictive Stack the Countries will get KS1 and KS2 children up to speed with the world’s geography in no time.
• Construct a weather station in your garden. A cut-open plastic bottle can be a rain gauge (mark centimetres up the side), a compass can help identify the direction of the wind and, if you cut the toe off a lightweight sock and attach it to a stick, it will literally become a wind sock. Make a chart and record the weather for a period of time and see how much it changes.  Why not present your findings as a weather report?

Now would be the perfect time to explore the world from the comfort of your own home or garden.  Have a look at some of these uploaded geography activities from Oddizzi.  To access the Oddizzi website both the username and the password are charlesdarwin.

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