Wednesday, December 28, 2011

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.

2 comments:

  1. My son loves his iPad also. What a perfect learning tool. I am sure Kai will be way ahead in school in Geography. There are so many apps for all the subjects. Kai is going to have a great time exploring his iPad through the apps.

    Alex earns Mommy bucks to spend on apps by helping his mother shop, load and unload the groceries.

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  2. We have been researching to find apps in different academic areas that would be appropriate for Kai. There's so many out there that it is a bit overwhelming trying to decide which are good and which are not.

    I like the idea of earning bucks to spend on preferred apps. We are always trying to come up with ways to motivate Kai.

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