Teaching Geography on Roadtrips with WonderMaps

Studying maps is an excellent way to teach geography.

We love maps–all kinds of maps:

1. the cartoon maps in coloring books
2. the globe in our living room
3. the huge world map hanging in our playroom

My husband and I both love to travel, and he has passed along his love of maps to our daughters.

The problem with maps is that they can become outdated.  In fact, we have at least a dozen maps that are not current. Having out of date maps can be problematic, especially when your kids hear about a location and want to know exactly where it is.

This is why I love WonderMaps.

WonderMaps is a software that is includes every map you could hope to use: the world, the continents, regions, nations, and the United States. There are also historical and thematic maps that are really handy supplements to a history study.

Right now we are learning about our home state of New Jersey.  The software makes it easy!  You can start out with a blank state and then add in the capital, other city names, and even rivers.   The girls had a great time marking where the state capital is, marking where we live, and then drawing in the rivers.

We also use WonderMaps when we travel.  We do most of our traveling via car, so as we pass through each state, the girls color it on a map printed from WonderMaps. We talk about the capital, and my husband likes to come up with random facts to make it interesting. It does help to pass the time, and since the software is on my laptop, we can open it everywhere.

On our most recent trip, we passed through New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida.  Having WonderMaps let us learn about each state as we traveled, adding new meaning to the phrase homeschooling on the road.

WonderMaps has been a wonderful tool for our homeschool days, and I look forward to sharing more about our travel adventures using this unique software.