We never really "taught" geography in the sense of "learning" the states or anything like that. Now, my kids know all the states, and most countries, by sight, but we did that with games and puzzles and constant "Oh, look, this is set in Mississippi--where's Mississippi? What's it like there?" We always kept globes, wall maps, and atlases everywhere and the kids just naturally were fascinated with them. We have several fun computer games, in addition to board and card games and puzzles. This worked very well for us.
For actual geography instruction, we tried to stick very close to Charlotte Mason's ideas. Meaning, we started close to us, first, by exploring our environment. The children learned and we looked for and discussed, prairies, creeks, rivers, hills, bluffs, forests. We learned to identify the four directions. We learned to use a compass and basic finding-our-way things. We explored the streets of our town, and practiced giving each other directions to get to certain places. We looked at maps and drew maps. We "took pictures" with our minds and then went home and drew pictures of and maps of what we saw. We did these things at about 5-6-7 and then began trying to find our place in the larger world. We slowly added learning about states, climate zones, habitats, countries, continents, oceans as we encountered them in reading, videos, etc. I really liked Charlotte's ideas of making sure geography was at first tied to their experiences, to make it real, and then tapping into imagination as they grew older and they began reading. It is so easy and no-stress to do it this way. When we read Mr. Popper's Penguins, we just naturally wanted to learn about Antarctica and other animals, about polar regions and cold, and why they are cold.
Just a thought. This really worked well for us. We weren't really drilling things that the child did not already know and understand about. In fact, we didn't do much drilling at all. Our mapwork was always related to what we were doing. We relied on games for the rest. It just seemed so painless this way. Since handwriting for us was NOT painless, we just really needed this approach. And my kids have ended up very geographically aware. They delighted me the other day--it was mentioned in a video about what the USSR did to the Aral Sea--and my kids knew where the Aral Sea was! I was pleased.
