June updates

So after a month of not doing anything with the geography after doing a 100% completion 3 days in a row (so no practice, no review), recall for countries was 99% and for capitals 83%.  Not bad!  I should probably decrease the testing interval to help with retention.  Countries are easier because I can use spatial memory to help with them.

Also I need to learn Turkey's new name.

Garden is coming along.  I have some extra random sunflowers, probably related to squirrels.  The radishes have all been harvested, and the corn's had its first round of nitrogen fertilizer.

Garden ca. late June

 

We lost all the pond fish this winter with the dramatic temperature swings, so after cleaning up the vines that were sucking all the water out of the pond, we got some new fish.  Last time we got two koi and four comets; this time we got four of each.  We had about thirty fish in the pond before, so hopefully in a year or two we'll see them start to multiply.

New baby fishes

Geography

So last week I decided I want to learn all the countries and their capitals. This was partly inspired by Worldle and partly because I'm reading a book on the history of Africa, and my knowledge of that continent is woefully thin.

Good news: this process has not been as onerous as anticipated. After 10 days, I've been able to list all the country names and all but 5 of the capitals (all in Africa, because a) woefully ignorant of the geography and b) Africa is huge). I want to see if I can repeat the countries for a couple days before I check the continents off on my list, and I don't know what I'll need to do for long-term maintenance of the information, but it's definitely progress. After I've got the capitals down, I'll move on to map locations.

 

Initially, the only continent I could fill in all the countries in was South America. This surprised me, other than it has the smallest number, because after Africa, South America is probably the continent I know the least about.  Since I have a fairly spatial memory, the continents where I do know where or what region a country is located were easier for me to ramp up quickly. Once I start working on the map part, it will probably help with long-term retention.

If this is something you'd like to try for yourself, my process has been pretty simple. First, I made a spreadsheet with a sheet for each continent and made lists of all the countries and their capitals. Then I made a worksheet on another tab to print and fill in, and I made a sheet to track progress in each category. I filled in what I could for each continent, then checked it against the spreadsheet lists, filling in what I missed in a different color. Writing by hand helps me learn things, so repeating this process daily has been useful.