Teaching Geography in the CM Method 

The Charlotte Mason method engages the child’s imagination by using plenty of living books, and the same could be said of teaching geography. 

Instead of having the child memorize countless meaningless names of places, reading about people who live in actual places bring them into an actual experience that makes geography lessons memorable. We do this by reading living books set in different locations.

Charlotte Mason on Geography

In this post, we will look at all that Miss Mason says about Geography in Volume 1 page 272 to 276: 

Geography is, to my mind, a subject of high educational value; though not because it affords the means of scientific training. Geography does present its problems, and these of the most interesting, and does afford materials for classification; but it is physical geography only which falls within the definition of a science, and even that is rather a compendium of the results of several sciences than a science itself. But the peculiar value of geography lies in its fitness to nourish the mind with ideas, and to furnish the imagination with pictures. Herein lies the educational value of geography.

Interestingly, in Miss Mason’s time, geography was taught pretty much the same way it is these days: memorizing capital cities, names of rivers and mountains—and sometimes even their lengths and heights, too!—many other seemingly irrelevant information from a dry textbook. It might also include plenty of mapwork—memorizing where a country or city is, memorizing all the fifty states, etc etc! 

Miss Mason has the following commentary on these kinds of geography lessons: 

Poor little fellow! the lesson is hard work to him; but as far as education goes––that is, the developing of power, the furnishing of the mind––he would be better employed in watching the progress of a fly across the window-pane. 

But we all probably agree that geography is an important subject to learn, and rightly so! When we grow up, we all need to know how to find direction, or locate places on a map. Miss Mason herself recognizes this, but also points out how we adults feel about reading a geography book: 

Nothing will persuade us to read a book of travel unless it be interesting, graphic, with a spice of personal adventure. Even when we are going about with Murray in hand, we skip the dry facts and figures, and read the suggestive pictorial scraps; these are the sorts of things we like to know, and remember with ease. But none of this pleasant padding for the poor child, if you please; do not let him have little pictorial sentences that he may dream over; facts and names and figures––these are the pabulum for him! 

Geography Lessons Should Be Interesting

Miss Mason holds that yes, geography is important, and indeed, the lessons should be interesting. Do you notice that when someone excitedly tells you about a trip he took somewhere, you also find yourself interested in the place and wanting to go there as well? This is an example of information seeped with living ideas, as told by someone who personally experienced a certain place and is passionate to share about it. 

Geography should be Interesting.––But, you say, this sort of knowledge, though it may be a labour to the child to acquire it, is useful in after life. Not a bit of it; and for this reason––it has never been really received by the brain at all; has never got further than the floating nebulae of mere verbal memory of which I have already had occasion to speak. Most of us have gone through a good deal of drudgery in the way of ‘geography’ lessons, but how much do we remember? Just the pleasant bits we heard from travelled friends, about the Rhine, or Paris, or Venice, or bits from The Voyages of Captain Cook, or other pleasant tales of travel and adventure.

7 Best Ways for Teaching Geography in the CM Method 

Taking our cue from Miss Mason’s description of geography lessons, here are some of our best ideas for teaching geography: 

1. Fill our child’s imagination with images. 

For educative purposes, the child must learn such geography, and in such a way, that his mind shall thereby be stored with ideas, his imagination with images; 

This is where excellently-written living books comes in, with stories and scenes that our child can see with his mind’s eye as we read them aloud. 

2. Feed him on what interests him. 

…for practical purposes he must learn such geography only as, the nature of his mind considered, he will be able to remember; in other words, he must learn what interests him. The educative and the practical run in one groove, and the geography lesson becomes the most charming occupation of the child’s day. 

Although the CM method is not primarily child-led, we still leverage on our child’s interests when it comes to geography, and focus first on learning about concrete details that are within his grasp. This is the reason why our earliest lessons on geography revolve around everyday experiences, such as the nearby woods, or walking to the grocery store, and not necessarily foreign countries yet. 

3. Start young, through long hours out of doors 

But, how to begin? In the first place, the child gets his rudimentary notions of geography as he gets his first notions of natural science, in those long hours out of doors of which we have already seen the importance. A pool fed by a mere cutting in the fields will explain the nature of a lake, will carry the child to the lovely lakes of the Alps, to Livingstone’s great African lake, in which he delighted to see his children ‘paidling’––”his own children ‘paidling’ in his own lake.” In this connection will come in a great deal of pleasant talk about places, ‘pictorial geography,’ until the child knows by name and nature the great rivers and mountains, deserts and plains, the cities and countries of the world.

Here we see that the countless hours spent out of doors during the early years form a crucial foundation for geography, and they can also become great stages for imaginative play from the stories that you may have read together. 

4. Introduce the value of maps through outdoor play and familiar places. 

At the same time, he gets his first notions of a map from a rude sketch, a mere few lines and dots, done with pencil and paper, or, better still, with a stick in the sand or gravel. ‘This crooked line is the Rhine; but you must imagine the rafts, and the island with the Mouse Tower, and the Nuns’ Island, and the rest. Here are the hills, with their ruined castles––now on this side, now on that. This dot is Cologne,’ etc. Especially, let these talks cover all the home scenery and interests you are acquainted with, so that, by-and-by, when he looks at the map of England, he finds a score of familiar names which suggest landscapes to him––places where ‘mother has been,’––the woody, flowery islets of the Thames; the smooth Sussex downs, delightful to run and roll upon, with soft carpet of turf and nodding harebells; the York or Devon moors, with bilberries and heather:––and always give him a rough sketch-map of the route you took in a given journey.

Miss Mason recommends learning the geography of places the child is familiar with first; that way, when you introduce a map—even a crudely drawn one on the sand!—the symbols mean things that he can understand. It becomes especially more interesting when you draw a map of the “route you took in a given journey,” and children love remembering well-enjoyed trips by tracing routes. 

5. Give him intimate knowledge of a given country or region. 

What next?––Give him next intimate knowledge, with the fullest details, of any country or region of the world, any county or district of his own country. It is not necessary that he should learn at this stage what is called the ‘geography’ of the countries of Europe, the continents of the world––mere strings of names for the most part: he may learn these, but it is tolerably certain that he will not remember them. But let him be at home in any single region; let him see, with the mind’s eye, the people at their work and at their play, the flowers and fruits in their seasons, the beasts, each in its habitat; and let him see all sympathetically, that is, let him follow the adventures of a traveller; and he knows more, is better furnished with ideas, than if he had learnt all the names on all the maps. (vol 1 pg 274-275)

Here we see one major difference of teaching geography in the Charlotte Mason method versus the traditional school way: we refrain from memorizing names of countries in a given region when those names don’t mean anything; instead, we invite our children to an intimate knowledge of a certain country or region through well-written stories. Through these tales, they become familiar with the kind of animals and plants that there may be, or even the way of life that the people have in a given country. Being able to imagine life in that place means more than being able to memorize all the names on the map!

6. Read well-written books of travel. 

The ‘way’ of this kind of teaching is very simple and obvious; read to him, or read for him, that is, read bit by bit, and tell as you read, Hartwig’s Tropical World, the same author’s Polar World, Livingstone’s missionary travels, Mrs. Bishop’s Unbeaten Tracks in Japan––in fact, any interesting, well-written book of travel. It may be necessary to leave out a good deal, but every illustrative anecdote, every bit of description, is so much towards the child’s education. Here, as elsewhere, the question is, not how many things does he know, but how much does he know about each thing. (vol 1 page 275) 

Here we see that teaching geography in the CM method requires pretty much the same principle as other lessons: the reading of plenty of engaging living books. A lot of our book choices for geography include travel tales, where we can follow the routes that the author or the main character goes on. In fact, we have that in the next tip: 

7. Use maps to follow a traveller’s progress 

Maps.––Maps must be carefully used in this type of work,––a sketch-map following the traveller’s progress, to be compared finally with a complete map of the region; and the teacher will exact a description of such and such a town, and such and such a district, marked on the map, by way of testing and confirming the child’s exact knowledge. In this way, too, he gets intelligent notions of physical geography; in the course of his readings he falls in with a description of a volcano, a glacier, a cañon, a hurricane; he hears all about, and asks and learns the how and the why, of such phenomena at the moment when his interest is excited. In other words, he learns as his elders elect to learn for themselves, though they rarely allow the children to tread in paths so pleasant.  (vol 1 p 275 to 276) 

Miss Mason values the use of maps in tracing a traveler’s journey, and then comparing it to a “complete map of the region.” My son loved The Adventures of Marco Polo by George Towle, and we enjoyed tracing where he was at any given chapter. It helped familiarize him with the different countries from Europe to China, while also giving him an intimate picture of the habits of the peoples that Marco Polo met. He especially loved hearing about different animals and different types of homes that he encountered. 

Geography is Enjoyable in the CM Method 

Let’s close with one of my favorite quotes from Miss Mason, about how lessons in geography, like other lessons, feed the imagination: 

–Now imagination does not descend, full grown, to take possession of an empty house; like every other power of the mind, it is the merest germ of a power to begin with, and grows by what it gets; and childhood, the age of faith, is the time for its nourishing. The children should have the joy of living in far lands, in other persons, in other times––a delightful double existence; and this joy they will find, for the most part, in their story books. Their lessons, too, history and geography, should cultivate their conceptive powers. If the child do not live in the times of his history lesson, be not at home in the climes of his geography book describes, why, these lessons will fail of their purpose. But let lessons do their best, and the picture gallery of the imagination is poorly hung if the child have not found his way into the realms of fancy. (Vol 1 p. 153) 

With these engaging ways of learning, we can see that geography can easily come alive when taught using the CM method. Stay tuned for our future posts on 10 Practical Geography Skills We Learn from Outdoor Time and Geography Living Books!