Its just the beginning of 2025 and an intersting current events topic for schoolers could be the story of making Canada a part of the United States. I don't know about most people in the U.S., but I never learned anything about Canada during my school years. We were taught geography, yes. I still remember the big fat geography book from fourth grade but nothing much from the contents.
I pulled out this 1948 publication, World Geography Readers- CANADA, published for U.S. schools in that era. Its a little 8" x 5" paper cover booklet of 32 pages with photos or maps on most every page. A way more practical tool than my fourth grade class had to use.
On the first page this title - Giant in Size - A Midget in Population is actualy a great way to get immediate perspective of the country or land mass we call Canada. At that time 77 years ago, and according to this publication, Canada was the world's third largest country, with only China and Russia being larger. It says that Canada's size, 3,843,144 square miles is about the size of the United States and Mexico combined. And, that the population is less than the state of New York. And, that almost all Canadians, 90% live within 150 miles of the US Border with most cities within 60 miles of the border. I haven't even turned the first little page yet. Just in a single paragraph I have a clearer picture.
Its not my purpose here to go into detail about Canada, but rather to explore the idea of real learning.- But if you'd like to get a summary or more extensive review of this specific little booklet for your own schooling purposes just use the Get In Touch button at the bottom.
For me personally as an old schooler, I learned more in this little useful resource in just 15 minutes than going online for 25 minutes. The title says CANADA, and that was all that it contained, in simple easy to understand pages.
Try this - go online and type in the single word CANADA.
A new schooler sourcing online has to go through many pages, sites, and even adds. Before learning anything I had to filter out a lot of useless data to get somewhere.
Even the Wikipedia source was challenging compared to this little book. For example, if I was age ten and I didn't know that demographics was where to look for the population of a place I wouldn't have found it. Sure, you can drill down and type in "population of Canada". But I prefer a table of contents and a flip of a page, its must faster and far more informational.
Just like the huge encyclopedic text book I had in fourth grade, the internet too can be large heavey and overwhelming- for any age.
Compare these 1948 details to 2025. Is Canada still the third largest country. Is the population larger or smaller that the population of California. Is the country larger than the United States in land space?
PLACES HISTORY SCHOOLERS BOOKS
