Where in the World?

 

There are lots of online geography games and board games, too. See what you can find and challenge your family to a geographical dual. 

Our local library allowed us to check out The World Game.  Players hop from country to country around the map perimeter by drawing a country flashcard and wagering whether the country they have drawn has a higher stat in areas like population, elevation, neighboring countries.  Fallon won.  Mom liked that the individual difficulty of this game could be adjusted to accommodate a variety of ages.  Fallon liked that she recognized many of the countries drawn from following the World Cup a few weeks ago.  

Acquire a penpal in another country (be sure to have your parents supervise). Exchange letters and get to know one another. Make plans to visit each other, even if it’s only pretend for now. 

Mom's Polish penpal has two sons (Jans and Piotr) that bracket Fallon in age.  Fallon has sent a couple letters to them as well as a few to a family friend in Utah and her cousins in Arizona and New York.  They have compared notes on vacations, books, and schools.  We hope to scratch Poland (or their favorite vacation destination-Egypt) off the map some day and meet them in person.  

She has also sent postcards from our trip to Barcelona last spring to all of her adult friends in the Wildflowers henhouse.  Here she is, in a Barcelona cafe with her address book, stack of postcards, fueling herself for a big correspondence session with a stack of Nutella pancakes.  

 

Learn how to geocache. Once you’ve learned, teach someone else.

The Girl Scouts have a Letterboxer badge which is a sub-species of geocaching.  To letterbox, the seeker makes a personal signature stamp and a finds journal.  They can also hide letterboxes by putting a stamp and log book in a water-proof container and posting clues about where it is hidden.  From there, seekers go hunt.  When someone finds a letterbox, they stamp their finds journal with its stamp and stamp its log book with their personal signature stamp, then they hide it again stealthily.  Fallon designed some stamps using adhesive foam and cardboard.  She brought these materials to her August scouts meeting and taught 8 other scouts how to make stamps, make letter boxes, hide and seek them in the host scout's yard.  Their clues used morse code, number-alphabet decoders, and compasses.  At the end of the meeting, they found all the letterboxes and compared which ones had the fewest and most stamps.  It turns out the trickiest and most satisfying one to find was hidden with the hose.  The scouts then took the caches home to hide in a new public place with fresh location clues.