Challenge A

From Maple Leaves to Northern Lights! Memorizing and Learning Canada

Every year, I try to put myself in the head of a middle schooler and figure out new ways to help them wrestle with geography and cartography. It’s no easy task to memorize drawing and labeling the whole world by heart. Some might even question the necessity (and sanity) of doing so (since let’s be honest, most kids are probably going to forget a lot of it anyway… and what are they going to use it for, answering a Jeopardy question at 40?), but I had to memorize and draw the world by heart as a young teenager, and not only did it make history and politics much easier to follow, it was also like an executive function super course. Taking a big project, breaking it down into chunks, and figuring out ways to remember everything is a huge skill that transfers over to so much of adulthood.

That said, there are certain “hacks” to help information stick in your brain…colors, novelty, music, pegging, mnemonics etc. I try to have my kids and students brainstorm with me, and so here’s this year’s fresh crop of new ideas. Homeschoolers these days have so many more creative tools at their fingertips than I did in the 90s. It’s not fair!

What we’ve come up with for helping to memorize Canada’s provinces and territories:

Big Alps Sing Many Quiet Old Nursery Poems Near Naptime to Young Northern Nomads.
British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Quebec, Ontario, Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island, Yukon, Northwest Territories, and Nunavut.

Save, print, laminate, cut into cards, and keep around the table while you’re drawing and labeling. Try memorizing and chanting to jump rope, cups, clapping, hop scotch, tango dancing or…you get the idea.

So that helps with the visual working memory, but it doesn’t include the capitals. For that we need a good old fashioned sea shanty. Here’s a song with all of Canada’s provinces, territories and capitals, including Ottawa! (for some reason, kids seem to skip that one).

You can download that here:

Canada-Provinces Territories (and Capitals)Download

It very intentionally matches the same order as the acrostic mnemonic, but be careful! The Canadian provinces and capitals might get stuck in your head.

As always, you can find my other Cartography resources here:

Challenge A Cartography workbook

Map drawing tutorials

Happy Homeschooling!

Reluctant Artists and a Printable Nature Journal

Whether you’re an avid Charlotte Mason homeschooler, a die-hard Classical mom, or a free-spirited unschooler… we all want our children to spend more time outside, soaking in God’s nature, and of course the holy grail would be if they actually drew/painted and wrote down what they observed.

If you’re reading this and are thinking, yeah? What’s the big deal? My kids already do that. Then this blog post is not for you. But if you’re down here in the valleys fighting the monsters of “I’m hot and this is boring,” and “can we be done yet?” or the dreaded siren call of electronics, then know you’re not alone.

So if you have kids with ADHD, or who dislike writing/drawing, or who act like they’re allergic to being outside, here are some things that may help (or at least maybe baby steps in the right direction).

1) Set clear expectations. “We’re going outside for 30 min” is better than the abstract, full Sound of Music, “The hills are alive with the sound of music” vibe where you picture you and your children picturesquely traipsing through meadows with butterflies, sketchbooks in hand, and pencils ready to go.

2) If you have a perfectionistic artist, switch to a pen and tell them it’s a magic pen where mistakes are not only allowed, but encouraged. They don’t need to draw and erase five thousand times with a pencil while they get more and more frustrated.

3) If you have a child with dysgraphia, have them treat the outdoors like a rough draft. The messy handwriting, random keywords, and stick figures are great! Let them come in and trace and type later when they’re ready. If they saw a bird they thought was cool, have them trace a simple generic bird outline from the internet, and then fill in the details and colors on their own.

4) If you have boys or kids who like competition, turn it into a game. “Can you find a leaf you’ve never seen before?”, “Person who finds the craziest bug wins”, “Silent game and see who can hear the most bird calls”.

5) And last but not least, give them the freedom to research and sketch something crazy. Yes, you want them to be inside, but sometimes kids just want to research man-eating crocodiles in Australia, or a cute, nearly extinct red panda bear, and that’s ok too. I think sometimes we forget that the goal is to fan the flame of intellectual curiosity, observation, and research, and that doesn’t always fit into our idyllic homeschooling ideals.

And if you’re one of those folks with a good printer and a speaking relationship with it, here’s a printable Nature Sketch Journal you can download for free:
1) Nature Journal w/Butterfly Cover
2) Nature Journal w/Grasshopper cover

It has space for both drawing and writing, and it’s formatted so your child can read their writing/notes, while their listeners can see their drawing.

If you need any other reluctant middle-school or Challenge A help (if you’re in Classical Conversations), you can find an ADHD friendly Latin workbook here. Or a traceable cartography workbook with drawing tutorials here. Or an anatomy workbook for kids who are strongly in the dialectic phase and like to argue and be opinionated here.

Meanwhile, I’m off to shoo my crew outside and pretend like we’re super chill about poison ivy and ticks! Ahem.

Freebie: Medieval Math Cards and Synesthesia

Do numbers have personality and gender to you? Fueds, family trees, romances…sibling squabbles? Or are they just numbers?

This question came up in my Challenge A class, and out of six kids and a few adults, only one kid and one mom didn’t do this. Since I’ve done this for as long as I can remember…involuntarily with both notes/music notation and math/numbers, I sort of assumed everyone did it to some extent (except for Jim because he’s one of those weird spreadsheet people). Obviously, 0 is the patriarch and 1 is his firstborn son who’s been such a disappointment to him. 2 is the matriarch… 7 is the perfect child who drives his siblings crazy because he really shouldn’t be…etc etc etc.

Turns out that’s an actual thing called Ordinal-Linguistic Personification, which is a form of synesthesia. A large percentage of kids do it, but they usually outgrow it. Only 1% of the adult population has Ordinal-Linguistic Personification, so I guess Jim’s not the weird one after all. There are other types of synesthesia too! Some of them I’ve never even heard of:


Grapheme-color synesthesia – associating letters or numbers with specific colors.

Ordinal-linguistic personification (OLP) – attributing personalities or genders to numbers, letters, or days of the week.

Chromesthesia – hearing sounds and involuntarily seeing colors.

Lexical-gustatory synesthesia – associating words with specific tastes.

Auditory–Tactile Synesthesia – Hearing a sound causes a feeling somewhere on your body.

So now I’m super curious about who else is a closet synesthete. 👀


But back to math, this whole number personification thing has made math discussions in class and at home so much more interesting. I was listening to the math map podcast and Dr. Gilpin recommended making your own number cards for quick arithmetic games…it’s hard sometimes to remember what numbers kings and queens are and if we decided aces were high or low. Plus, it would be nice if the cards went up to 15 like we do with skip counting.

Soooo, thanks to the power of the internet and a little late-night insomnia, here are some personified number cards for all your little creative math geniuses (or right-brained ADHD-prone kids). If you want four suites like regular playing cards, print two sets. (make sure you select “fit to page” otherwise your printer will chop off the color). You can make blue cards negative numbers and red cards positive numbers…you can add the red and minus the blues…or multiply and divide. The sky is the limit! (I included a whole list of quick, fast medieval-themed math games that will tempt even the most dysgraphic sensitive kid into doing math…perhaps even liking it)
Enjoy.

(and if you’re looking for other screen-free homeschooling help like Challenge A survival Latin or Cartography, you can find them here.)

Draw the world. Trace the world. Paint the world…Whatever your heart desires.

Don’t tell me if someone has already done this, but I finally drew an accessible world map. Straddling the GenX/Millenial line means I know how to use electronics better than a Zoomer, but not as well as a true dyed-in-the-wool GenX. Consequently, I have been struggling to find the perfect whole world map for nigh on 7 years now. You’d think it would be easy, but it needed to:

A) Be easily photocopiable and printable (you’d be shocked at how many maps have weird gray areas or water that don’t copy well).
B) Have the longitude and latitude lines go OVER the countries. This is super important to be able to draw it using the grid method.
C) Be the least garbled Mercator projection so the grids are in straight lines.
D) Have nice thick, easily traceable lines so it could be put on a window or lightbox.
E) Fit on a standard 8.5×11, but also be printable in bigger sizes.

It has been driving me crazy for years because I’m sure it exists somewhere and I didn’t need to draw one myself, but I couldn’t find one I liked. But I really didn’t want to make one myself because drawing the whole world takes time and effort…two things in short supply when you have 4 kids and a million other responsibilities and priorities taking up one’s time (like reading historical fiction till 2am…cough cough). I tried several times, but someone always spilled something on it, or I couldn’t get the perspectives and lines right. It was my own personal Sisyphean task…every time I worked on it, I somehow found myself back at the beginning.

So even though it feels rather anti-climatic at this point (faint drumroll), here is a fully traceable, fully drawable, fully expandable world map that may or may not be totally accurate. (I used Google Maps for the most up-to-date borderlines, but the world isn’t exactly stable and black and white right now):

World Map 8×11Download

There’s even a matching blank grid included. I think drawing and familiarizing kids with the world is incredibly important, especially these days. Once when I was working as a server, I had a table of customers who were from Kyrgyzstan. They asked me if I even knew where their country was. Not only could I tell them where it was, I could also tell them every country that bordered it. In all fairness, they didn’t realize how many years I’d been teaching middle schoolers how to draw the world by heart. But seriously, world news and issues make so much more sense if you have a working mental picture of the world.

I’ll get off my soap box now. I figure at the very least I made an exceptionally time-intensive free art page. Heck, you could even print it super large, paint it with your color scheme, and frame it… or color all the places with missionaries you pray for…or color in a new country every day and do a unit study…or…or… I’ll stop now.

If you are inspired to have your kids learn to draw the whole world by memory, you can find the sum of all my labors here: https://www.etsy.com/listing/1185775539/cartography-workbook-challenge-a-now-1st


Life from the blind Tilt-A-Whirl and Grumpy Cat Math Notation flashcards

I thought tutoring Challenge A this year was going to be easy because I’ve done it so many times. I remember the ol days when students circled typos in It couldn’t just happen, backline maps were in the back of the guide and the math map wasn’t even a gleam in anyone’s eye.

Then I got a corneal ulcer from some sort of death ray staph/mrsa which in my imagination looks like the eye of Sauron erupting on the top left side of my left iris. It’s not only taken out a good bit of my vision, but it also makes my eye spasm like I’m on some sort of hellish carnival ride with strobe lights. All of my dreams for a smooth school start have come crashing down, but in some ways it’s good, the kids are all pitching in and my 3rd born may turn out to be my most independent Challenge A kid yet.

Of course if I could have chosen a year to have this happen, I wouldn’t have chosen The-Year-Of-The-Math-Map to be a director, but here we are. Our class is slowly sampling and nibbling at this advanced math feast, and I think good conversations and connections are being made. But holy wow, I cannot handle the math notation flashcards. I don’t know if it’s because I’m half blind, or it’s my ADHD or what, but my brain cannot handle the double-sided flashcards with the definition matching the opposite side. I look at it over and over, confusing myself even more and more.

In a fit of internal angst…over so many things, I made Grumpy Cat Math Notation flashcards. Since Math symbols can have a variety of definitions, I put the main on in the speech bubble, and all the extra information in Grumpy Cat’s thought bubble. First tour students can work on the speech bubble level, and more advanced folk can memorize the extra information.

Since It really is quite difficult to see (especially a computer screen…this blog entry is being typed with my eyes closed and shoutout to Grammarly), I only have the first 4 weeks done (15 pages total, so if you do one page a week you should have them memorized by Christmas and can start over and review in the 2nd Semester).

That said, here they are! Enjoy.

GrumpyCatMathNotationFlashcardsDownload

If you’d like an update when I have the rest of them done, you can give me your email here and I’ll let you know when they’re all up.

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P.S. If you aren’t in Classical Conversations and have no clue what I’m talking about, thank your lucky stars. Although if you think it sounds fun to teach your child the definition of a radix point or the Greek phi (not to be confused with pi), then by all means feel free to include them in on the fun. Math is for everyone! We’re in our math era.

Printing tips: Print black and white and save ink and toner if you’re printing on thin paper otherwise you can kind of see the answers. Select “double sided” or “print on both sides” and then select “head to head” or “flip on long edge”. Make sure the orientation is set to “portrait” and hit print!

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