Creating country reports

Hi! Future Ticia 2025 here, I’m updating this post, and there are a lot of great things in here, but there are also some things in this geography lesson that are not relevant anymore, so it’s getting a substantial revision. Like the book and the curriculum that started this whole thing are both out of print. So to start this whole thing off, let me delete the whole first paragraph…

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Imagine two deleted paragraphs telling you all about an out of print curriculum…

My goal for country reports:

My ultimate goal for my kids is for them to be independent learners who love learning.  With the country studies, I want them to take another step in that direction, I want them to be able to complete these reports on their own.

Teaching how to do a country report (how to find information)

First, we looked at the information they needed to get from their reading: language, continent, food, and more.  Then I showed them how to underline the information they needed so it would be easier to find as they completed each part.

This was one of those skills that was a big help to me in college, if I could see the important things because it was underlined or highlighted, it made studying easier later.

 Side note, I had this brief time where I wrote a mini book for each country we studied with all the information I wanted them to get and just threw in some random clipart I found in a quick search, you know back in the day when Microsoft still had free clipart you could use. That means I have a couple of random country summaries in my subscriber area (JOIN MY NEWSLETTER).

I have an entire post on teaching how to take notes (oh this is a post that desperately needs to be updated too).

Teaching how to do a country report (how to record information)

Did you ever have a high school teacher who made you take notes on note cards?  I did, one of my teachers to help us understand how to create a report made us put each different fact on a different note card.

Lapbooking to me is a similar idea.  You put each fact or information on a different (sometimes interactive) piece of paper.  My kids enjoy the ones that have folds and flips to look at and will go back into our other pseudo lapbooks (they’re a combination of lapbook and notebook) and spend 15-20 minutes looking at them.

After some feedback from the kids, I tweaked some parts.  Originally I had created lots of fun-looking shapes, but the kids didn’t like those as much, so I took them out and changed it to just ovals and rectangles.

 So, far we’ve created one for North Korea for our Around the World in 12 Dishes (expect to see that soon, I think this is that post), and one for United States (my trial run).

If you’d like a simple United States country report you can find it on my subscriber page (again, JOIN MY NEWSLETTER).

If you’d like to put together your own Country Report lapbook, then join my newsletter to get access to the Subscriber page.