Continent Exploration

by Rosebud

As I described in this post, the girls have been working with the Continents Puzzle Map for several months.  Recently, I have added a couple extra activities to go along with this work.

This world puzzle is inexpensive and the perfect difficulty level for Turtle.   I found a Usborne Books Picture Atlas at a consignment sale that is intriguing to both of the girls and filled with lots of detailed information.

Then the girls each made their own world map out of blue poster board and colored construction paper.  This project took Turtle about 2 hours and Rosebud worked on it off and on for two days.  They are both very proud of their maps

 After tracing the shape of each continent on paper, the girls used a wood-handled puncher to perforate around the edge of the continents' shapes.  This puncher is the same diameter as a pencil and develops the same fine-motor muscle groups as the child is perforating the paper.

 by Turtle, with Continent labels

Along with the animal cards in the Animals of the Seven Continents set  that the girls received at Christmas, there were also black and white, unlabeled sheets of the animals from each continent that I colored and laminated as a control sheet for the girls to copy.  They colored each animal, (Turtle labeled them as well) and cut the animals apart to make pages in a little booklet for each continent.

Since the girls have each of the 35 animal cards from the above set down pat already I found another set  of continent-corresponding animals to print for free from this Montessori Materials site.  The girls were thrilled to discover that there were MORE animals from each continent. :)

Lastly, I ordered the book below that I remember finding fascinating even as a teenager.  I can use it to introduce (in my own words, and probably just to Turtle at this point) how children live in other countries, and then as the girls grow older they can read on their own the more detailed information the book provides. 

I find that the girls have a hard time grasping the proportion of the puzzle map with the actual big wide world.  They keep asking if their cousins live in another of the continents (since WE live in North America) and I've had to keep assuring them that really EVERYONE we know lives in North America too -- excepting people they have never met, like St. Theresa, the Pope and Madeleine.   Then, yesterday our landlord was over at our house to renew our lease and he lives in the Philippines and works in Hong Kong.  So, we were happy to find that now the girls know someone who lives in Asia. :)