Sweetness and Light

Geography Boxes, Redux

Yes, I'm here to bore you agaiin with our Geography Center, boo, boo!  No really, I was a tad frustated with my lovely little white boxes from Michaels that I wrote about here, and I have since found many other uses for these gems, but wanted to show you our new and improved Continent Boxes. Thanks to Costco and their never-ending ability to supply shoppers with just the right item at just the right time :)  As you can see in the picture, there are colorful boxes stacked on either side of the beloved Puzzle Cabinet.  Contained inside these much larger and more functional boxes are all the Continent Materials and Three-Part Cards from my favorite Montessori site Montessori for Everyone!!

Here you can see them somewhat color coded, but not specifically.  Antarctica is not made up yet.  Here's a look inside a few:

Africa:  (clockwise from top) A Sonlight K book as titled below, Africa Fact Sheet, All Africa Card Material, Animals of Africa.

North & Central America:  NA & Central Fact Sheet, behind are the Control Maps, All card materials separated by small treat bags from Micahels and standing up in the smallest boxes that came with the original pack :)

Europe:  Control Maps, Card Material, Europe Fact Sheet, Arrows, Currency.

We are very happy with these materials and continue to add to them as the year progresses and we discover new things to include.  The best part is the dear children can access them easily and without having to guess which box is which and they hold a ton of items and keep them neat and tidy inside!!

The set-up for all the boxes is basically the same, with some of the unique items to each Continent being included!  Hopefully you're not all snoring at this point, but I really needed a Continent Box Redux, so thanks for visiting and putting up with yet, another Geography post!  We'll be off to play with our pin maps now :)

Geography in Action!

Friday was a day of great success in the learning and presentation department for everyone!!  We had ALL kids of Geography Fun!

First off I presented the Sandpaper Globe and all noted the vast amount of water.  Sean-Paul kept saying, "See mommy, it's smooth."  I also presented the Continents Globe and I pointed out that each Continent is a different color and that that would be important for them in a few minutes.  After everyone had a turn with the Globes, we moved on to the Puzzle Map of the World, we also call this the Map of Hemispheres!  We talked about how this is what the Globe would look like if it was cut in half and laid flat, and that the colors of the Continents on the Globe are the same as the colors of the Continents on the Puzzle Map as well as each Color Control Map  (All of our Geography Materials are from Alison's Montessori and we are SO pleased with their excellent quality and their friendliness towards Montessori Home Schoolers)!! 

As you can see in the picture above, Seamus is working on matching the Continents Puzzle pieces to the Color Control Map, he did it perfect the first time!!

Meanwhile, Matthias is working on identifying and matching Continent Cards to their Names, and Violet pictured below is placing Arrow Markers from the Continent Kit onto the Color Control Map!

This was a nice review of the Continents Material for the oldest two and Matthias asked if we could DO Geography everyday, and of course I said you can CHOOSE it whenever you WANT!!!  Yippee! Seamus who is just getting the Continent Material for the first time was just elated!!  Even Sean-Paul was focused and NOT disruptive for once :)  After Seamus had finished placing all of his puzzle pieces, I named all the Continents for him as the first lesson in the Three-Period Lesson. 

Violet moved to coloring and labeling her own Continents Map and Matthias switched to the arrow markers and control map.  Seamus also decided to begin work on coloring his own Pre-Labled Continents Map and made it about half way!

Meanwhile, I kept Sean-Paul happy reading him The Umbrella by Jan Brett.  Afterwards, we got out the South America Color Control Map and Rainforest Toob Animals and boy did he go to town placing them on the area of the Amazon River and Rainforest!!  He delightfully worked on this for quite some time!

The big kids all decided to have a turn as well and then this led to pulling out the Biomes Cards and Animals.  You could say, it was a "Toob" kind of day!!

After lunch and during Sean-Pauls nap, Seamus and I did the third period of his Dinosaur Cards. He did great naming almost all 9 Dino's and then he wanted to match cards and words (names) and then (you guessed it) the Toob Dino's!!  He also looked extensively at this great Dinosaur picture book we have and we talked alot about how fierce and big the Dinosaurs were.  He next chose to do the Rainforest Animal matching to the South America map (as he missed that before lunch).  I just LOVE these Maps!!

Whew, it was quite a day, I do hope our next week's plans work out so smoothly.  Have a blessed week ahead and thank you so much for visiting today!!

Geography Central!!

I finally have the beginning's of my Continent Boxes for our Geography Center!  I am so excited about this as I know the dear children are going to really thrive with their Geography studies as in the past, they have just been so-so! 

My inspiration comes from the VERY Creative and industrious Theresa of Lapazfarm Homelearning and the wonderful set-up that Jennifer of Wildflowers and Marbles has created in her learning room, not to mention all the wonderful ladies at the 4Real Montessori Fourms! 

We start with an empty white box from Michael's (these came nesting with two smaller boxes I have yet to decide what to use for, but I assure you, they will come in handy!)

I wanted to do something elaborate on the box lid, but for now we will settle for the Continent and a few stickers.  I think I will have the kids add to it with pictures or stickers as we discover more about each Continent, then it will be more decoupage looking!

I have quite a few coins that I collected in Europe and these will naturally go into the Europe box!

This nifty little caddy (only $1) and you can be assured that I picked up SEVERAL, will be just great for our Continent work and especially TOOB animals storage!  Here I have a set of Biomes Cards with Animals to match.  (Still need to pick up the Arctic Toob).  Don't miss Andrea's post at Gray Family Circus for some great inspiration on how to use your Toob Animals!! (I LOVE her Felt World Map)

These Landforms Cards were a very generous gift from Alison's Montessori and we LOVE them!!!  I have them here with the Elementary Landform Definitions that I printed off at Montessori Materials.

These were so fun to put together and I know the kids can't wait to get at them!!  I saw this initially at the NAMC site sample lesson plans and finally got around to getting it together!  It'll be a blast with colored blue water, sea and land animals, people and perhaps some small trees and bushes to add! And check these plans out too, we'll be doing this as well!!

Pin Maps to go with each Continent are currently stored in the second smaller white box (that came nesting) and I'm thinking I may glue each Cork piece into the top underside lid of each box and then fill the boxes with extra Continent Stuff, like Toob Animals, Flags, a Music CD representative of some of the countries in that Continent, extra Three-Part Cards, Fabrics....the ideas could go on forever here!

And last, but certainly not least, here is our Geography Cabinet, compliments of my dear, sweet and so very generous parents (Thanks M & D) and was found at none other than Alison's Montessori!!!  We LOVE it, I can't say enough good things about it, it's going to be a very integral part of our Geography learning this year, pivotal, if you will!!!  Don't you just LOVE the Globes!!  My kiddos are thrilled to have them!  The thing I love most about this great cabinet is it's compact size and it's ability to hold all of our Geography materials in a neat-and-tidy kind of way!  All it needs, it a big basket of Geography books next to it, and Viola!!  Geography Central!

We will also be using many of the resources I have listed in our Geography Lesson Plans from last year!!  I hope you'll follow along our Trail as we blaze along with some Great Geography!!  Thanks for visiting today, many blessings to you!

Geography Fun! (AKA, Love That Laminator)!

Well, I can't get enough of my Laminator, it's hands down, one of the best additions to our home school this year (thanks M & D)!  We had some Geography Fun with one of our favorite books, Geography from A to Z on Wednesday and created some great Nomenclature cards!! (Once again, thanks to Kim F)  The older kids did their own cards and I laminated some for Seamus Montessori style!  We can't wait to go through the whole book, it'll be quite a nice collection of Geography facts for our school! 

 

 

The first picture at the top are the tinier replicas of these 8 1/2 x 11 inch cards that I made for Seamus and he can use the smaller ones to match and check himself when reviewing the cards!

After doing their definitions and drawings I gave everyone some modeling clay and we all made Archipelago's and Atolls with our clay!!  Quite satisfying indeed, especially for mom, we'll have to bring that clay our more often, it's quite therapeutic!!  A very fun and easy way to look at Geography!!  Thanks for stopping by!!  Blessings!

Great Geography

I was so inspired by Kim's post on geography that I decided we neeed to re-think how we've (or I've) been approaching this great subject and try to make it more real and fun!  One of the kid's favorite non-fiction picture books is Children Just Like Me, and we'll be using it along with some of the super geography books Kim mentions, like Geography from A to Z, and Material World, as well as our wall maps and Uncle Josh's Outline Map Book, we love these!  These are all excellent representations of living books that will help make geography come alive when we're studying a certain region or come across a particular land form in our historical reading.

For a hands on approach for learning the land forms Kim recommends using plastic "zip lock" style containers for the kids to form the land piece in to and then add "blue" water (if necessary) to show some perspcetive.  I also really like how Kim took the Montessori "nomenclature" card idea and made her own landforms document by dividing it into large sections.  One for the name of the land form another for a drawing by the dear children, and the bottom for the explanation or description of the land form.  It's brilliant and so easy and doable and best of all, learnable!! BAM, it's just like Emeril :)  We'll also use puzzles for tracing the states and continents and filling in the topgraphical information with salt or paint for more hands-on work. I love this approach and I'm certain we will be doing alot more geography with this new method!!  Thanks Kim, your a lifesaver!!

I think Geography just got a little better and certainly more fun!!  How do you approach Geography in your home school??  Thanks for stopping by and May God Bless you in your Day!!