Week of October 4 - World Geography

This ended up being my favorite theme so far! And a couple of weeks later we're still revisiting some of this material.

Passports

I found this adorable passport printable to start off our studies of the world. I thought it would be really fun for the kids to record where they studied, but what was even more fun is that Charlotte had no idea what a passport was. I forgot that she hasn't ever needed one!

The kids had a lot of fun customizing these, and loved to open them up and see a picture of themselves.

Postcard Activities

I saw this fun postcard activity idea and wanted to modify it just a little bit. I wanted to use real pictures of each landmark, so I borrowed from these lego cards and used these countries of the world coloring sheets to make postcards. On one side of cardstock, the kiddos would color the sheet for a country - we would look up what the flag looked like and any other information they might have needed. On the other side, the kids would paste landmarks that they had found by sifting through a pile of pictures and name tags. Charlotte seemed really into it and like she was understanding how to match the words, so I had her do this mostly on her own. I thought that Charlotte would blow through these and glue everything quickly, but she was so curious and inquisitive about each place that we would end up discussing each country she worked on and looking up answers to some of the questions she had (e.g. "Why is the Roman Coliseum kind of broken?"). I was pleasantly surprised, and we're still working on some of these countries a couple of weeks later whenever she feels like it. I didn't get around to using them, but we originally chose world geography week because of her interest in Egypt, so I had these ancient Egypt pack on hand. Once Charlotte finished a postcard, she would write the information into her passport. She was way into it!

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Endangered Animals Puzzle

I LOVE doing puzzles with Charlotte. She's so sweet about it all and gets so excited for me when I find a piece I've been looking for. We had a lot of fun putting together this map puzzle and talking about animals and why they live where they do. She also had a chance to work on naming some of the continents - but she still sometimes calls them planets. Geography is tricky, props to all you geography teachers!