As a young student, my elementary school organized an after-school geography club that I participated in. Being curious about different places around the world, I loved getting to learn about geography with a handful of other kids who were also eager and excited.
In junior high and high school, I returned to help with this club, eventually running it entirely. In that time—the past several years—I worked on making and preparing geography materials for elementary-age students, mostly from scratch. We would host the club for six weeks each fall (thus the six-week structure I've set up), and each year the kids who came were more keen to get started.
It was exciting to see growing interest in the club each year, both from students and from teachers at other local schools. I came to realize, though, that as much as I loved teaching these students myself, it'd be tricky to expand to other schools in this way.
With the normal routine of things disrupted during my senior year, including geography club for the fall of 2020, I decided to expand and polish the materials I'd made and publish them so teachers at any school could create a geography club of their own. By creating this project, I'm hoping to capture for elementary students the same spirit of curiosity and passion I remember feeling in elementary school while making geography curricula available to more people.
The activities are meant to be much more than just a battery of questions. Instead, I've packed each individual question with a handful of hints that will serve as helpful clues for finding the answer and as important information about the topic at hand. By giving more than just a single sentence for each question, I'm trying to make the goal not to finish the activity but to learn something new and interesting.
The ready-made activities can be used as a foundation for after-school geography clubs, added in as classroom supplementation, or presented as material for inquisitive kids to test and build their knowledge of the world.
Each week links to a question activity centered around a common geographic theme (Africa, for example). I've set them up in six-week years, but they can be easily mixed around. The questions are designed to fill a session of 30-45 minutes.
Here's an example of how to organize a club session, plus some other random suggestions:
For a session with 20 students, split the kids into four or five groups (or more, depending on how they want to divide themselves). Each group gets a map, and each student gets a sheet of the questions for that week. Some of the questions are challenging, so it can be helpful to have other resources to help students out. We held the elementary geography club in a library, so they had books on hand. Or, if computers are available, these could be used, too.
I've found that setting aside 30–45 minutes for the main questions is usually good. Should the students finish earlier, here are a number of ideas to supplement or extend the club session: