Dream Destinations - Cultural Geography

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Since we're dreaming about destinations, why not dream big? A world tour! There are so many places all over the world I'd love to visit, and it's more than just the natural landmarks or different climates that are appealing. I think it would be so much fun to get little glimpses of the different cultures and see some of the buildings - ancient and new - and other monuments that people have built. Turns out this was basically what my daughter wanted to concentrate on for social studies in her early high school years.

Kennady had a specific interest at that time in studying the geography and cultures of Europe. We learned that the focus is actually called Cultural Geography, and that BJUPress had a high school textbook of the same name. The Cultural Geography textbook covered the entire world, and she wanted to start with Europe, so we combined part of this textbook with Visits to Europe (See my post Dream Destinations - Europe for the details about that resource.) in her Grade 8 year. Then in Grade 9 she finished this textbook and learned about the cultural geography of Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas. 

In the first year, combining Cultural Geography with Visits to Europe meant an emphasis on maps, and we also started looking at the books Material World and Hungry Planet, both by Peter Menzel. These books describe the everyday lives of people in various countries, and show photos of their living quarters, household possessions, grocery provisions, and meals. We continued referring to those books as we looked at the countries of the other continents.

Cultural Geography from BJUPress is a rigorous high school level study, and other families we knew used it over two years instead of one as well. Whether you combine the study with other materials or not, there is a lot of material to cover and I think most Grade 8 or 9 students would find it daunting to do everything in this textbook in one year.

The text opens with two units that introduce general geography studies, with focuses such as climate, vegetation, earth's waters, industries, and more. All very valuable background information about the study of geography and cartography, and how those disciplines relate to the the studies of climate and cultures! Our science focus that year was meteorology, which also tied together very well.

With the foundation laid, the text moves on to study the countries of the world by continent. There is a vast amount of information about may countries and regions, including economies, dominant religions, native cultures and colonization, and a bit of history. 

We often tried to do some related artwork, and tried some foods from the different cultures. Geography Through Art, Eat Your Way Around the World,  Holidays of the World Cookbook for Students,  and the website Global Table Adventure are all valuable resources that we used, and that I'll be sharing about soon!

Some material from this post appeared previously on this blog in other articles. One of these is: From the High School Lesson Book - Geography Review.

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