Last week, we made some new friends from Central America. The children wanted to know where El Salvador was, and our new friend tried to explain, 'kind of below Guatemala and next to Honduras'. But that did not help much since the geography of the Americas was not a priority at school.
Thankfully, by the end of the day we could distinguish between Costa Rica and Puerto Rico by location as well as their shapes, thanks to Montessorium's Intro to Geography. The new release made it easy for our first-time geography students to learn all the countries in the region.
The app is presented as a map routed through 10 different stops that are actually five stages alternating between North America and Central America. The journey begins through a simple matching activity of the shapes. Shapes are naturally more memorable than names and concepts as an introduction to their geography.
The rest of the stages focus on matching country names with the spatial dimensions already mastered. The developers have incorporated the spiral progression of knowledge to attach new information to the previously learned lessons. The country names are then added to the shape-matching exercise as part of the progression from shape to name to place and geographical location. With reinforcement, the children can move to deeper levels of understanding.
Finally, all the exercises and individual countries are employed in the entire North American continental map to help grasp the big picture. There is a presentation of countries' flags and names, which are then tied to the shape and location. This builds a deeper appreciation of the proportion of the countries in relation to one another.
Unfortunately, once you complete the map, you start again as a new player and cannot return to previous stages if you want to review. So the only way to recap learning is to start from the beginning. The app crashed a few times, and because it lost our earlier achievements it is hard to tell if the accumulation of icons would translate in any meaningful way.