Ask your grade schooler to find Iraq—or even New York City—on a map. Not even close? Well, older students don’t know much about geography, either. A recent National Geographic–Roper survey finds that only 37 percent of 18- to 24-year-old Americans can identify Iraq on a map; half can’t even locate the Big Apple, and 20 percent are unable to pick out the Pacific Ocean. While elementary school students today are getting heavy doses of reading, writing and arithmetic, geography just isn’t making the grade in most classrooms. What we tend to forget is that geography isn’t just map smarts: It’s cultures, environments, languages, peoples and places. It’s the key to opening the door to an increasingly global future, including success in a global workforce. So it’s more important than ever to counter the geographical brain drain. Here’s how to bring the world home to your child:

Make maps accessible. Stick a world map up on the wall, keep an atlas within reach, and put a globe on the study desk. Whenever a faraway place is mentioned on TV or in a book, locate it together. Talk about the world. Clip a newspaper article about a global event and share it with your child. Switch from cartoon TV stations to watch and discuss Discovery Channel’s amazing series Planet Earth, a showcase of worldwide natural wonders.

Let your child study a language. Kids soak up new languages like sponges. Yours will thank you—someday—when she’s using her Mandarin or Italian in her career or backpacking across Europe. If your school doesn’t offer world languages, bring it up at a PTA meeting.

Celebrate a global holiday. Host a Chinese New Year’s party and make dumplings and lanterns. Acknowledge La Festa della Donna by giving girls you know a bouquet of yellow flowers. Fly a kite on Kodomo-no-I Day. Find more in Kids Around the World Celebrate! The Best Feasts and Festivals from Many Lands.

Cook international dishes. Try out family-friendly recipes of other cultures. Travel to India via a mango-yogurt lassi; to Egypt via a buttery, flaky baklawa; to Ethiopia via injera, a spongy traditional flatbread. Kids Around the World Cook! The Best Foods and Recipes from Many Lands offers interesting facts and easy recipes.

Travel online. Take the Geography Bee quiz at nationalgeographic.com/geobee. Next, find a satellite image of your neighborhood at maps.google.com, then zoom out and travel to another location in the world. Meet children at Kids Around the World, katw.org. And check out our world from an alien’s perspective at NASA’s astronomy picture-of-the-day site at antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod.

Grab your passport and go! Compile a list of places your family wants to visit. Let your child research and plan a trip. Then hop on a plane and discover our amazing world. She might even find out where New York is.

Amy Souza is a public school teacher in Chicago