Homeschool · Geography
Classic geography books for children, from C. C. Long's Home Geography and Alexis Frye's First Steps to Frank G. Carpenter's travel readers on every continent, free to read here or download, with a step-by-step teaching guide for Home Geography.
Begin with Home Geography. The teaching guide takes you through it lesson by lesson, starting from what your child can see outside the door. When it is done, go on to First Steps in Geography and the Carpenter readers.
Geography starts at your own front door. Begin with what your child can see and walk to, the street, the nearest hill and stream, the way the sun moves across the sky, and draw a simple map of a room, then the house, then the neighbourhood. Then widen the circle, to your town, your country, and the whole round world. Keep a globe or a big map near where you read, and find every place in the book on it. Carpenter's readers and the Little Cousin books are for that wider circle, read aloud like a journey.
These books were written between the 1890s and the 1920s, and much has changed since. Borders and the names of countries and cities have moved, populations have grown, and many of the ways of life they describe have gone. The travel books also reflect the attitudes of their time towards other peoples, sometimes in ways that would not be said today. Reading them with an adult nearby, and talking about what has changed, is part of the point.
For the first years of geography.
C. C. Long's conversational lessons start with what a child can see close to home, such as hills, streams, ponds and the weather, and use them to imagine the rivers, mountains and seas of the wider world.
Scanned from a University of California Libraries copy.
Alexis Everett Frye's short course for two school years, with many maps and pictures, on how people live with the land, its climate, products, trade and cities. Much of it is about the United States. A good next step after Home Geography.
Scanned from a University of California Libraries copy.
Frank G. Carpenter takes the children on a “personally conducted tour” of each continent. One book to a continent; read them in any order, with a map open beside you.
A tour through the United States, Canada, Mexico and Central America, visiting farms, mines, forests, cities and natural wonders such as Niagara Falls, the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone, and on north to Alaska.
Scanned from a University of California Libraries copy.
From New York through the new Panama Canal and down the west coast, over the Andes and Lake Titicaca, round through the Strait of Magellan, and up through Argentina and Brazil to the Amazon.
Scanned from a University of California Libraries copy.
Across the Atlantic and through the countries of Europe as they were just before the First World War, steaming down the Rhine and the Danube, climbing the Alps, and watching the midnight sun from the North Cape.
Scanned from a Library of Congress copy.
A tour of the countries and peoples of Asia, meant to be read alongside the map to bring the names on it to life.
Scanned from a University of California Libraries copy.
Around and through Africa, from the Mediterranean lands and the Sahara up the Nile to Abyssinia and across to the Indian Ocean. Written in colonial times, so read ahead.
Scanned from a University of California Libraries copy.
A zigzag tour of Australia and the chief islands of the world, especially those that had lately come under the United States, such as Hawaii, Samoa, the Philippines and Puerto Rico. It is written from the American point of view of 1904, so read ahead.
Scanned from a University of California Libraries copy.
From the Little Cousin series, each the story of a child in another country. A few representative titles of many; they are short, and good for ages 7 to 10.
Isaac Taylor Headland, who lived in China, tells of a Chinese child's home and family life, with pictures from photographs and drawings by Chinese artists.
Scanned from a Cornell University copy.
Mary Hazelton Wade's story of a child's everyday life in Norway.
Scanned from a University of California Libraries copy.
Mary F. Nixon-Roulet's story of a child's everyday life in Spain.
Scanned from a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill copy.
For the history of the places in these books, see History.
Every book here was published before 1931, so it is in the public domain in the United States: free to read, print and share. The scans are kept by the Internet Archive, which shows them on this page and supplies the PDF downloads. The teaching guides are written for this site. Modern reprints are also sold, if you prefer a clean printed copy.