World Map

The World Map is always exciting to do with young children.  They see the globe in our classroom everyday, but can not quite fully grasp how large our Earth really is.  T-Man has been working with this for awhile now, but Mumbs happened to join in today and it was very cute.

The presentation consists of the child learning the names of the continents and then being able to label them.  However, T-Man can't read yet, so it requires an older child or myself working with him to accurately name the continents.

After he labels the continents, he places them back in the puzzle.  Then we do another 2nd period lesson with the names.  He is not quite at the 3rd period lesson.  We will hopefully move to that soon.  It's quite funny though.  He calls Africa, "Kenya".  Hey, at least he knows that Kenya is on that continent!  So, there is clearly some work to be done.  Mumbs is nearby during the presentation so she is absorbing all of it.  

Here is our Geography shelf.  It is a bit sad looking these days.  The colored boxes are the continent boxes (which I will post on another day).  However, some of the labels are ripped off from past crawling babies and it has clearly not been on the priority list to fix them.  The maps are disheveled and prop

Once the presentation was done, I took T-Man back to the globe to emphasize that the two "hemispheres" or circles that he was seeing on the flat map, were actually round.  Then we read a book with some interesting facts about each continent.  

Another material he used was some information on each continent.  It has a few cards for each one with famous landmarks.  I have continent boxes as well, but I usually present those as an extension after the child has done the individual continent map.  It contains food, clothing, musical instruments, animals, etc. from that particular continent.  See that post here.

As an extension and also a fun messy craft, see the link to the post on Making a Globe. 

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