A Little Geography

We read Maps and Globes by Jack Knowlton last week and it started a little bit of a map craze around here.

I hadn't intended to start map work until next fall, but that's the great thing about homeschooling- sometimes the opportunity presents itself and it would be crazy not to take advantage.

I've always loved the geography program presented in The Core by Leigh Bortins, so I showed the boys the 5 circles and where they were on the world map and how they could use those to place their continents. I demonstrated continent "blobs" to them and they were not impressed- Ender and Ezra love to draw (and recently to copy directly from book illustrations) so the fact that the "blobs" weren't the real shapes of the continents just didn't fly. They insisted on going at it getting as close to the real continent shapes as they could.


Ezra thought the latitude and longitude lines were really cool, so all of his continents have grids.

And what would a map be without color?

Ender memorized the continents and oceans and their locations last year during Kindergarten, so his first continent drawing was a little more accurate than Ezra's.

He did decide that he should add countries (and even made a passing comment about how drawing maps would be a great way to learn the names of all the countries, haha!) and I think he at least drew in boundaries for some of the larger countries.

I told Ender we'd practice drawing all of the continents for a little while until they got to be about the right size (as compared to the atlas we're using) and then he could pick just one continent to draw for awhile. And he announced that he has a lot of thinking to do so he can pick "just the right one". I'm curious to see what that will be!

Resources:

Maps and Globes

As The Crow Flies

The Seven Continents

Rand McNally World Atlas

DK First Atlas