The year's just started, and already I've taken you on a long journey to the moon, so it's time to come back to Earth.

In this post, you'll get to know the Earth a little better than you did before. You're going to learn a simple and fun way to memorize the countries!

As you may have learned when memorizing U.S. states and capitals, there are many approaches that can be taken. For the countries of the world, the story approach is very popular.

South America only has 12 countries, so it's a good place to start introducing the technique. The video below, as well as all the videos in this post, were created and developed by YouTube user eveRideorg, who has done some very creative work putting them together:



See? That was short, fun, and most importantly, memorable. If you practice those mnemonics for a few days, you'll have South America memorizzed in no time!

Next, with a little help from a seal, a Yorkshire Terrier, and other amusing images, we'll move down to memorizing Central America and the larger Caribbean Islands:



If you can just picture that dog, you'll have many of the Central American countries memorized without effort! Geography often seems to kids as a chore, but hopefully you're starting to see how fun it can be!

Now that you have the basics down, it's time to move on to a larger challenge! Europe has many countries, but the story approach still works. In the following video, there are several smaller stories used to describe different sections of Europe. The stories can then be connected together to help you remember the entire continent.



At this writing, eveRideorg has only posted these 3 videos, but judging by the comments, there are plans to release more in the future. Asia and Africa should be especially interesting. It took about a year to create the above 3, so hopefully we can expect to see the rest before 2014!