When my son was about three I thought I'd give him some idea of maps. I went through the whole bit of drawing a plan of our flat, and pointing out how you could go from one room to another and point to where you were on the plan. He liked the idea and caught on all right, so I then drew a zoomed-out view showing our building, the car park and the supermarket across the way. He caught on to that pretty quickly, I thought, so I got out the large-scale Michelin and progressively showed him our street, then our town, etc. Finally I got out the atlas, put it beside the map (of France, now) and turned to the map of Europe. I put my finger on Yorkshire and said "and that's where Granny and Grandad live."
The nipper put his finger on Cyprus.
"Yes," he says, "and there's a duck on the river!"
End of lesson.