Kai’s Latest Obsession: Geography

We are now an iPad family, as it was one of Kai’s Christmas presents this year, generously given by his grandparents in Japan. Thank you, Jiji and Baba!

Kai loves it, and has been on it often the past few days.

We loaded some apps that are said to be helpful for teaching communication skills to kids with autism. But Kai has not been too interested in them and we haven’t pushed him to use those too much yet, though we plan to soon.

For now, his favorite apps are two that teach geography: Stack the States, and Stack the Countries.

As with anything that Kai gets into, he doesn’t just enjoy it, he develops an obsession about it.

Kai especially loves playing the country game, which he has been doing often. But I don’t mind because it really encourages him to learn geography.

Every time he wins a country on the game, he goes to his big world atlas (a present from another grandparent last birthday), and looks up the country to see what the flag looks like or to get some other information. Then he goes online to find out when the country won its independence so that he would know its “birthday.”

He’s getting to be quite the geography expert, now being able to answer some questions better than I am. And when I play with him, I am learning, too.

For instance, after learning that there was a country called Nauru, we went to Wikipedia to learn more about it. We discovered that it is a tiny island nation in the South Pacific, and is the second least-populated country in the world after Vatican City. For a time, its phosphate reserves gave it the highest per-capita income of any sovereign state. But then the phosphate ran out and its economy is now in shambles.

Okay, I’m sure that is more than you ever wanted to know about Nauru.

Hmm, perhaps I’m the one with the geography obsession.