The best and cheapest investment in homeschooling curricula I ever made was a 1992 Hammond Ambassador World Atlas. I bought it at a used library book sale in St. Cloud, Minnesota for two dollars. Only two dollars! We have traced many exciting journeys in our atlas and, because it cost me next to nothing, I boldly mark the maps as we go.
Pamela just started reading aloud The Endless Steppe by Esther Hautzig, a memoir about a Polish family herded into cattle cars and forced to work at a labor camp in Siberia during World War II. When I circled Esther’s hometown, Vilna, on our Russia page, we noticed she lived close to the hometown of another Jewish girl who fled her home in Berdichev, Ukraine in Letters from Rifka. Her family fled Russian persecution of the Jews after World War I. We had circled several cities to trace Rifka’s journey to Ellis Island: Warsaw and Antwerp.
Pamela enjoys finding geographical connections between books. When we learned that Ralph Moody was moving to Maine, she was thrilled because Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm lived in the Pine Tree State too. Although the towns featured in this book are not in our atlas, we circled what might have been the model for Riverboro (Hollis, the town where the author spent her childhood). Not far from Hollis is a town called Windham, whose name bears a striking resemblance to Wareham from the book. It might be a coincidence, but we circled it anyway. After reading the first chapter of Fields of Home, we added two more circles to our Maine page, namely Bath, where Ralph’s ship arrived, and Lisbon Falls, where his grandfather lived.
Twenty-three pages of terrain maps of the ocean floors are a lifeline as we read The Sea around Us. Rachel Carson described continental shelves, which Pamela found colored light blue on our relief maps, and the deep ocean in dark blue. When the author named the Atlantic Ridge, Pamela traced it with her finger as well as other ridges outlining the continental plates of the world. When she read about various trenches, Pamela located them and traced quite a few. As her fingers traveled across the ocean, we are reminded of other nautical journeys in our present (Carry On, Mr. Bowditch and 20,000 Leagues under the Sea) and from our past (Kon-Tiki), all of which are marked in our atlas, which we are tranforming into a prized momento of our literary travels.
AUT-2B-HOME IN CAROLINA ~ Teaching our twenty-five-year-old daughter with autism and aphasia, who is still learning about God, the world, and its people with a little help from Charlotte Mason
2 comments:
Tammy, we use some other used books as consumables, as I call them and even Alan's Saxon Math book will be trash when we finish it. Buying a used Atlas for this purpose is brilliant and I am going to be searching for one, too. Thanks for the idea. Alan loves geography, and attaching place names to fiction and non-fiction reading through writing in the Atlas is a terrific idea.
Mary, I cannot take credit for this one. Many Charlotte Mason homeschoolers do this prior to a reading or lesson. We can thank Charlote Mason herself for inspiring this idea:
A map of every part of this beautiful earth not only brings to mind the great geographical features like mountains and rivers, but associations, images of people busy at different things both in history and in the present. In our schools, we focus a lot of attention on map work. Before reading a lesson, children find the places mentioned in the text on a map. They learn where they are, their relativity to other places, and to specific parallels and meridians. (page 224)
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