4 ‘Shockingly Easy’ Ways To Blend Geography & Music Studies For Tweens

When I tell parents that they can blend geography and music studies, I often see their jaws drop. 

Did your jaw just drop, too?

Well, don’t be surprised.

It can be done and in this post, I am going to show you exactly how you do so when teaching your primary schoolers geography. 

I have even made a printable available with age appropriate activities for tweens.

You can use the printable to take their learning to the next level, irrespective of the country or region they are learning about for geography in the homeschool. 

Ready?

Shall we get started?

Let’s assume your kids are learning about Japan for geography. 

This way I can focus all the activities on Japan, but remember, you can customize it for any country or region they are working on currently. 

Japanese Musical Instruments

Yes, the first and easiest activity to implement would be to ask your kids to research and create a presentation about Japanese musical instruments. 

They can learn about the origin of the instrument, the different composers who specialized in writing music for that specific instrument, they can watch videos of how to play the instrument, they can even try to DIY the instrument, if it is not too complex. 

What do you think? 

Won’t they just have a lot of fun with this activity.

Japanese Music

You can take the above activity a step further if you want to and create an entire playlist of songs played on the instrument that your kids learned about when doing the previous activity, and play the music in the background throughout the homeschool day. 

On the other hand, you can ask them to research and find Japanese folk music or any other genre of Japanese music, create a playlist listen to it. 

Emperors Of Japan

This activity may be considered more in line with history rather than geography, but let me introduce it anyway. 

Let’s say your kids are learning about Japan again, so why not research when music flourished and which emperor contributed most to the development of music in Japan? 

Research, which regions in Japan saw the most development of music (ahh, now do you see the connection with geography?)

Comparison Of Japanese Music

How about comparing music from Japan with music from a different part of the world like China for instance?

Create two playlists, one for Japanese music, another for Chinese and listen to it. 

Draw conclusions on which one you like the most, and why?

Discuss aspects such as what instruments were used and how the rhythm was different from one to the other? What were the different instruments used in each piece etc?

Now that you’ve read through the entire post, what do you think? 

Do you like the ideas?

Which one will you be implementing first?