Googley-Eyed

My favorite tool to teach geography, besides actual maps and globes is the amazing freeware of Google Earth. In the history of the world, no tool has been made that comes close to this fantastic software for teaching kids the majesty, the marvel and the mystery that is our earth.

My son's math book used a table of the world's more prominent mountains. Everest, Fuji, the Matterhorn and Colorado's own Pikes Peak were in that table. To spice up the day, we just switched to geography and used Google Earth to view satellite imagery of all these mountains and more. For example, with Mt. Everest, we saw how it was merely the tallest of many peaks clustered around it, while at Mt. McKinley, we viewed its solitary wonder. Looking closer at Denali, we saw the glaciers.

"What is that? A highway?" my son asked. He couldn't believe that what he saw were rivers of ice from year after year of snowfall actually running down a mountain valley, carving its sides like a sanding belt and carrying a pile of sludge to a--I'm getting excited too...Can you tell?--moraine and usually creating a tarn (lake). His eyes nearly popped out of his head when I told him that he had swam (swum?) in a glacial tarn only a year or two ago. I took him to Grand Lake. I popped inside the photo bubble to show him the small beach we stayed at and the small harbor he and I had braved. He still remembered how cold it was, and was it ever!

Today, my son learned about glaciers because we had the flexibility that he never, never would have had in a class-based school. Oh, he would have learned about glaciers, tarns and moraines eventually, but once the test was done, he'd have forgotten them. My son and daughters are too bright and too unique to shovel into those schools. You know what? Your kids are too.

Today was a good day homeschooling. I love these days.