Exploring the Globe

I have been meaning to write about this for a long time, I just can’t seem to find a gap in the doing things to actually write about the things that we are doing. Oh well no point stressing about what I haven’t yet recorded in the words of the ever determined Inigo Montoya "Let me ‘splain. [pause] No, there is too much. Let me sum up."

We have been studying our world. We started last year in a very similar way to the presentation in this video.

This is my globe, it doubles as a bed side light. Eli likes Australia to point to him while he sleeps.

I didn’t quite have the gazillion dollars needed to buy all the Montessori equipment so I made the continent puzzle out of felt.

We also used a wall map of the world from the post office.

After all of the kids including Sabi could easily identify the continents we went back to the first one in the song, North America, and started looking at the individual countries in it. We watched videos, borrowed library books, cooked and ate food, listened to music, attempted traditional dances and finally made a lap book to document our discoveries. It took about a term to visit Canada, USA and Mexico.

Then we moved onto South America and did the same thing only we chose three countries and focused on them after a brief review of the whole continent. One of the countries we chose was Brazil. On top of library books we also watched the movie Rio and researched Carnival. We made our own masks and danced to Brazilian music.

After reading the Great Kapok Tree we spent a fair bit of time looking at the Amazon rainforest. We even built our own mini rainforest in the school room with painted very big cardboard rolls. Other books we read from South America were Up and Down the Andes, My Name is Gabriela and Ghost Hands.

We’ll be heading into Africa next and Lani is quite excited she’s always loved lions, I’m just not sure how I’m going to find documentaries on them that wont traumatise our zebra loving Lilly.