Tag Archives: Geography

Around the World with Beautiful Feet Books: A Review

Ever since my son and I began studying the History of Science with Beautiful Feet Books last year, I’ve been on the lookout for something similar that will be a perfect match for my school-averse kindergartner.
Imagine my delight to find an early elementary curriculum that travels around the world: Around the World with Picture Books. My kindergartner has loved the chance to explore different countries, just by reading books and doing similar, related projects.With Beautiful Feet Books, we use great literature as a spine to learn about countries around the world. We love this new curriculum for our early elementary homeschool social studies!
Continue reading

Learning about Native American Homes

I first wrote the booklet about early Native American homes because I could not find something simple for a brief introduction to Native Americans for my son. I wanted him to understand that there was a variety of cultures living on the American continent before Europeans arrived. I wanted him to understand that the vastness of the country meant that not every American Indian lived in a tipi. The various landscapes of America meant that the various groups of people also lived very differently.
As I said, I could not find an appropriate picture book for my son back then that shared that kind of information. So I wrote one with the information I wanted to share. The Early Native American Homes booklet shares some details about the homes early residents of North America lived in, and how those homes reflected the environment in which they were built. Continue reading

How to Bake an Apple Pie and See the World Activities

We learned about where food comes from as we read How to Bake an Apple Pie and See the World.As I mentioned before, we’re following Jamie from Simple Homeschool in her #GiveYourChildTheWorld book club this summer. How to Bake an Apple Pie and See the World by Marjorie Priceman was one of the first picture books we picked up for this book club.  We’ve had a lot of fun doing some activities to go along with the book.  Continue reading

A Simple Continents Preschool Lesson to Introduce the World

It’s the beginning of Jamie Martin’s (from Simple Homeschool) Give Your Child the World book club! The book club goal is to read multicultural books about various parts of the globe to help our kids understand the big picture of the world. Yes, Jamie is doing this book club as a part of a promotion for her new book. But I enjoy book lists and book challenges, and I was planning on doing a basic continent overview with my daughter this summer anyway. This is truly perfect timing!
This week is the general multicultural week. My son was born overseas and has always been fascinated by maps. He’s a visual learner. When he was four, we spent weeks pouring over maps and making our own maps of our home, street, city, and so forth. But my daughter, Strawberry, is a super active preschooler. Making maps and looking at lots of different maps would be extended torture for her. Instead, our continents preschool lesson this week was quite simple and brief, but she’s remembered her place on the map (and the globe) since then!Our simple introduction to the continents included finding our spot on our globe. I think her favorite search was to figure out what street we're on, as it required a walk. Continue reading

Matching Global Landforms to Continents

My son loves maps, especially the ease of browsing places and seeing what they look like on Google Maps. Since, in his geology class, he has been learning about mountains and volcanoes on the earth’s surface, we played a matching game using some of the landforms he has come across. I gave him the names of some of the global landforms he has encountered in his studies and asked him to figure out which continent they are on!My son practiced putting the world in order by finding the correct continent for the common global landforms we've learned about.
Continue reading

Treasure Island-Inspired Compass Treasure Hunt

I’ve recently finished reading Treasure Island in the original and unabridged language with my son. In Treasure Island, young Jim Hawkins travels across the ocean to a remote island, where the crew of the ship mutiny and turn out to be pirates! They spent plenty of time on the beaches of Treasure Island, and both my son and I enjoyed the setting, the intrigue, and the final result of their treasure hunt. To celebrate our finishing the book,  I wanted to do something fun! Why not have a backyard treasure hunt in our backyard “island”?
A Treasure Island-Inspired Compass Treasure Hunt
Continue reading

Embracing Mess: 3 Reasons to Let Mess In (Paper Mache USA)

Embracing Mess: Three Great Reasons to Let Mess In
Despite the fact that I am a homeschooling mom to two, and therefore I am surrounded by my kids all day, I cannot stand chaos and mess. I just do not do well. My son has never been overly interested in crafts projects. He likes building projects and reading and putting things together, but he too does not like mess.
My daughter is a different story. She wants to try it all!
So, when I read Recipes for Play a few weeks ago (reviewed on Rebecca Reads), I started feeling the urge to try something messy and drastically different. I saved some newsprint and bought paints. We were going to make a three-dimensional paper mache model of the United States. I learned to let mess in, and I learned about teaching in the process!  Continue reading

A Virtual Trip to Nicaragua

My parents are currently serving a religious mission in Nicaragua. They will be gone for two years, and it’s only been five months! We miss them very much but thankfully we have modern technology (SKYPE!) to make the distance seem much shorter.
Our co-op does a culture day every few weeks. When they did Nicaragua, we knew it was time to take our own virtual trip there to get to know where Gramma and Grampa are!
We pretended to take a vacation for a virtual trip to Nicaragua. Continue reading