The Teaching of Geography (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: sand may be drawn upon a sketch map of the sand construction. If the school is situated in a district in which Nature has been kind enough to provide examples of land forms, it will be possible to take expeditions to view the actual scenery and to reproduce the main features in miniature in the sand and then to measure the relative heights and make contours, and to compare these contours with those on the Ordnance Survey map. CHAPTER III TRANSITION GEOGRAPHY The home land. The term transition geography refers to that stage in teaching wherein the pupil is mainly concerned with the investigation of geographical principles, rather than with the acquisition of geographical facts. The main purport of this stage is to train the child in the meaning and use of geographical shorthand. During the later portion of the preceding stage, the child was gradually introduced to the notion that he was to do much of his work for himself, and it is now time that he began to make discoveries of facts and to suggest his own generalisations. For this purpose it will be well to confine the attention of the children at first to the home land, and then to extend the knowledge of principles so attained, by applying them to a wider region, the area which surrounds the North Atlantic Basin. At thesame time, the world setting both of the home land and the Ocean shorelands must be preserved; thus the subject-matter of this stage will be Britain, Western Europe and Eastern North America, with reference to the world as a unit. The process of investigation must follow a consistent plan. Relief, climate, vegetation, mineral deposits, occupations and distribution of the population, production and trade, communications and trade routes, are the main headings under which the geographical story sho...