Globes
A globe is a fascinating toy as well as an important educational tool that you can use to get your child interested in the world and its shape and disposition.
In most geography classes or lessons, the representations you would find of the earth are not really realistic. For reasons of better topographical understanding or strategic planning, people often find that it's easier to spread out the pictorial facsimile of the surface of the earth on a flat surface.
However, that is not really conducive to a child's learning process. A child's geometrical imagination isn't so strong yet that he or she can conceive the earth's shape purely from descriptions and formulas. He or she has to actually see the spherical representation, hold the round in their hands and let it rotate freely around its own axis, to really understand the shape of the world she lives in, and its movements.
I remember an experience in geography class where many of us couldn't understand what caused eclipses. In those days there weren't too many hi-tech gadgets used in schools. The teacher improvised by drawing all the blinds, lighting a candle, and using a globe and another spherical object (probably an apple) as models for the phenomenon. The globe was the earth of course. The apple was the moon, and the flame the sun. Needless to say, this generated a lot of interest among us, and by the time the class was over, we really knew what eclipses were all about.
This is the kind of magic you can work with globes. You shall often find a thoughtful child sitting all by herself, spinning a globe as she contemplates the continents and oceans flashing past. It is a vital part of elementary education to let a child become familiar with a globe, because it builds in her a sense of the three-dimensional world we live in.
The use of the globe as a representation of our planet could not, of course, begin before the discovery of the fact that the world was spherical in shape. Since the dawn of human civilization, people believed that we lived on a flat surface, and if they sailed in any one direction for too long, they ran the risk of falling off one of the edges.
The first globe was constructed by a certain Martin Behaim, amateur astronomer from the German city of Nuremberg. The year of its making 1492 is significant too, because it was very close to the time when Christopher Columbus was making his first voyage to the 'new world'. That was an age when mankind was for the first time in a position to conclusively prove something that many philosophers had suspected since ancient times that their world might indeed be shaped like a sphere, and it might be possible to sail right around it to come back to the same point.
In fact, Columbus's journey was intended to find a sea route to India, but the belief in a spherical globe made him sail west, not east, because he thought it might be easier to approach that fabulous land from the other direction. That he failed to reach India is of no importance (that feat was reserved for the Portuguese pirate Vasco da Gama, in 1498). what is much more important is that this new idea about the world's geometry had resulted in one of the most momentous discoveries in the history of Europe the discovery of two new continents.
Behaim's globe was not the sort of neatly labeled chrome-and-plastic thing you see on most desk-tops nowadays. It was a veritable rotating encyclopedia, because it contained references to numerous bits of misinformation and folklore that passed for geography in that age. Copies of it are still studied by scholars hoping to find out more about what was taught in schools in Behaim's time!
It is from there that this neat little tool has developed into the useful teaching aid that it is today. Get one for your child's desktop if you haven't one already.
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