Great Geography Website

I always look for new and interesting ways to make my son learn the core subjects. My daughter is a lot like me she reads a lot. She would fill out workbooks for FUN! My son is like my husband – if it looks like schoolwork in any way shape or form, he wants nothing to do with it. But this changed the other day when I came by an anomaly- a website that made geography fun, http://www.sheppardsoftware.com.

Although I agree with the basic idea of unschooling that we will all learn what we need just by participating in life, I also believe that there are certain number of things that you don’t “need” to know but that you should know as a cultured human being. I believe that being able to place all the states in the United States and a fairly strong knowledge of their capitals is one of those things. For my son though, reading, remembering, and being able to place the states (and or the capitals as we have been challenging ourselves) is very difficult. He has learning challenges especially as it relates to reading and processing (Some days the way he works out his math confuses me and I know what he is doing.) . Truthfully, it was kind of embarrassing the first time that he completed the beginner level. I thought, “Come on, you know this. We’ve been there.”. “How could I ever put him back into public school? They would laugh at him and me.” But the game really caught his interest and while his first game was dismal, he was willing to play again and again until he received a higher score.

When he finally took a break, I jumped in. I told myself that I would just brush up on my skills. Well, let me tell you that these Geography games vary from beginner to quiet advanced. I believe it was the Cartographer level when you have to try to place states in their proper location on a blank outline map and when you put them on the map they disappear. Being from the Northeast, I rocked the New England and the East Coast, but properly placing Wyoming and Nebraska proved to be a real challenge. Or you can take it a step farther, rotating and resizing states before placing them on the map. Hmmmm! Maybe I’m not Smarter than a Fifth Grader. I won’t even begin to divulge my scores on naming European countries. I don’t mean the typical Spain, France, and Italy, but all those Eastern European countries that didn’t even exist when I went to school. So now my son and I have to battle for use of the computer to play the Sheppard Software Games. This experience has reminded us that one of the great things about homeschooling is that it is a game that the whole family can play.

PS. If you go to the mind games, I’ll warn you that Castle Defense is addicting too.