Thursday is geography and history day and I really wasn't sure what I wanted to teach them today. Then I remembered something I had seen on Pinterest about making personalized maps and set to work putting together something that would work for us.
I love the idea of showing the boys that their room and our corner of the world is just one tiny speck in the grand scheme of things.
We started with the world map and worked our way backward through North America, The United States, New England, etc. and we'll end up with their road, house and room.
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What the finished product will look like--
it's just missing the picture of "my room" |
I have been wanting do to this project for a while but knew the boys would complain because it's a lot of work-- there are 10 pages to complete.
I found printable maps for almost everything at
Eduplace. I only wish I had been able to scale the maps down a bit. I cut a piece of colored construction paper for each layer; making sure the pages got larger (or smaller) as we put our books together.
We had so much fun with our maps too!
I don't like that the United States ended up being larger than the world, but I think they still get the idea. I was impressed with Ian though, when we sat down and he started coloring the world map he told me he was coloring the oceans near the poles a dark blue since the water was colder there and he'd use a light blue when he got near the middle since the water gets warmer there.
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| Ian shading his oceans for temperature |
I asked them if they knew what that line in the middle was called and Alec yelled "the equator!"
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| Hard at work |
I had them point out the United States on the world map, we talked about the other countries that we share North America with, I had them find New England on the United States map and asked them to point out our state countless time.
We talked about how even the states are divided into different regions called Counties. I told them the name of ours and had them find it on the map. I then had them find our town and showed them how small it is in relation to our state, how small our state is in relation to our country, etc.
It was great and they all did an amazing job!
Evan decided to do things his own way and instead of starting from biggest to smallest he went from smallest to biggest. He drew the blue walls and his two beds in his room, he drew our green house and blue door for our house and he drew a very big, very gray road for our street. It was cute.
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| Drawing our house |
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| Evan finished the first 1/2 of his packet |
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| Alec and Ian worked on the 2nd half of their packets |
We finished up schoolwork by mid morning and I packed up our lunches and bikes to head to a homeschool group play date at the lake. We hadn't seen our group in almost a month so we were all anxious to meet up with everybody.
We stayed at the park for 3 hours and the boys ran, jumped, yelled, rode bikes and scooters and basically just had fun playing with lots of other kids their own age.
That looks like a fun activity! I'll have to remember it for our studies.
ReplyDeleteIt was a lot of fun.
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