This easy to understand course is very hands-on for your young 1st and 2nd graders. With printable lessons and activities, you will get them motivated and excited with little effort on your side.

Lesson designer Lisa McClanahan has done a great job of teaching the young student how to use and understand a map and atlas. She has really put a lot of thought into this curriculum and has designed it to be an engaging story to learn the land and culture of many places across the globe.

Here is a small sample of the exciting story line that is used to teach your child in a fun and adventurous way. This is an actual part of the first chapter of the reading material that is provided. Get your own Course Sample with this lesson to do the fun exercises and worksheets with your children AND enjoy the fun story that goes along with this geography course. We've shared mainly the text here, but your PDF sample will include images and other section for completing activities.

Hunker down and grab a snack; pull the youngsters onto your lap - the adventure is just about to begin!

Lucy’s uncle and Mother Bunch traveled around the world by ship. Mother Bunch was born at sea and married a sailor so she wasn’t from any one place.

Draw a picture below of how you travel today. Watch these World Book videos to give your early learners ideas. [Access to World Book Online is included with a SchoolhouseTeachers.com membership.]

Lucy is allowed to play with a globe while she is at her uncle’s house. A globe is a replica of any planet. The globe Lucy was twirling looks just like the earth only smaller. It shows bodies of water and land.

[image in sample lesson]

This globe also contains the constellations. During this time, sailors used the stars to find their way in the ocean.

[image in sample lesson]

If you flatten a globe, it becomes a map.

If you zoom in on the map and combine all those maps into a book, you will have an atlas.

[image in sample lesson]

What do we use today to find our way?

There was once a wonderful fortnight in little Lucy’s life. One evening she went to bed very tired and cross and hot, and in the morning when she looked at her arms and legs, they were all covered with red spots, rather pretty to look at only they were dry and prickly.

Nurse was frightened when she looked at them. She turned all the little sisters out of the night nursery, covered Lucy up close, and ordered her not to stir, certainly not to go into her bath. Then there was a whispering and a running about, and Lucy was half alarmed but more pleased at being so important, for she did not feel at all ill and quite enjoyed the tea and toast that Nurse brought up to her. Just as she was beginning to think it rather tiresome to lie there with nothing to do except to watch the flies buzzing about, there was a step on the stairs and up came the doctor. He was an old friend, very good-natured, and he made fun with Lucy about having turned into a spotted leopard just like the cowrie shell on Mrs. Bunker’s mantelpiece. Indeed, he said he thought she was such a curiosity that Mrs. Bunker would come for her and set her up in the museum and then he went away. Suppose, oh, suppose she did!

Mrs. Bunker, or Mother Bunch, as Lucy and her brothers and sisters called her, was housekeeper to their Uncle Joseph. He was really their great uncle, and they thought him any age you can imagine. They would not have been much surprised to hear that he had sailed with Christopher Columbus though he was a strong, hale, active man, much less easily tired than their own papa. He had been a ship’s surgeon in his younger days and had sailed all over the world and collected all sorts of curious things besides which he was a very wise and learned man and had made some great discovery. It was not America. Lucy knew that her elder brother understood what it was, but it was not worth troubling her head about only somehow it made ships go safer and so he had had a pension given him as a reward and had come home and bought a house about a mile out of the town and built up a high room to look at the stars from with his telescope and another to try his experiments in and a long one besides for his museum. Yet, after all, he was not much there for whenever there was anything wonderful to be seen, he always went off to look at it, and whenever there was a meeting of learned men—scientific men was the right word—they always wanted him to help them make speeches and show wonders. He was away now. He had gone away to wear a red cross on his arm and help to take care of the wounded in the sad war between the French and Germans.

But he had left Mother Bunch behind him. Nobody knew exactly what was Mrs. Bunker’s nation; indeed she could hardly be said to have had any for she had been born at sea and had been a sailor’s wife, but whether she was mostly English, Dutch, or Danish, nobody knew and nobody cared. Her husband had been lost at sea, and Uncle Joseph had taken her to look after his house and always said she was the only woman who had sense and discretion enough ever to go into his laboratory or dust his museum.

[more to Chapter 1 in the sample lesson]

[image in sample lesson]

Lucy recognized the names on the globe as the same ones she learned in her lesson book at home. The world contains seven continents and five oceans. The globe and maps are smaller copies of the real world. Just like a toy car is smaller than a real one. Using the map above, write all seven continents.

[writing section in the sample course]

There are five oceans in the world. Copy the names of the oceans from the map.

[writing section in the sample course]

On the seven continents, there are many countries. Within the countries, there are many more states, counties, cities, towns, and neighborhoods. Neighborhoods have homes, plants, and people. Mother Bunch explains that no matter how different children look they have two things in common: they all make noise and they all want to eat.

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There’s much more to this course sample so get your copy of the sample lesson. If you’d like to see all that SchoolhouseTeachers.com has to offer your family (one membership price for every member of your family – including access to lots of parent resources!), then go to the membership page to get the first month for $5.