The Salt Dough Map

One of the unwritten requirements of homeschooling seems to be that you must, at some point in your adventure, make a salt dough map with your kids. I don't know why this is, but mine is not to question why. Anyway, a salt dough map seemed like a fun way to gently ease back into school after a couple weeks off.

My idea was to make our own continent with as many geographical features as possible. The kids thought it would be excessively cool to make Wahoo Island from our Wii Resort game. We compromised. Who am I to argue with enthusiasm? We made a mostly authentic Wahoo Island and added a few extra features.

We used this book to learn some new geography terms and figure out how to model them:

We then baked our creation for 3 hours and painted it!

The finished product:

In the end, we had just about everything in there, including:

• an isthmus
• a waterfall
• a river
• a butte
• a sea arch
• a plateau
• an atoll (well, half of one)
• a lagoon
• an erupting volcano
• beaches
• caves
• islands
• a breaching whale

Good fun!

Fun United States Geography

Although we primarily focused on building character and a strong foundation in the three R's this past year (second grade), we did do some short unit studies, including the human body, the 12 days of Christmas and the Iditarod. But there was one unit study we kept going all year - our state study. Each week, we put a new map on the refrigerator and read all the interesting facts.

A friend and I are sharing this set of Highlights' "Which Way USA?" maps that we found at a used curriculum sale last year.

We turned it into a year-long bird and flower study by printing out state bird and state flower coloring pages. Whenever possible, we looked up the bird or flower in one of our guides. We also printed an outline map of each state with the capitol. These coloring pages went into Z-Man's workboxes each week, along with the bird book or flower book. We then put everything for each state into his notebook.

We practiced our United States geography with this FUN book and game:

And got a little family competition going with this free, online game.

Now that summer is here and lots of people are traveling, we keep some colored pencils and an outline map of the U.S. on a clipboard in the van. When we see an out-of-state license plate, we color it in! We're in NY - we were SO excited when we saw Alaska! We're a little geeky like that.

Our Trip Around the World!

This year, Z-Man will be in third grade and Little Man will be a 3 year old pre-K. We are planning to take a trip around the world! Wouldn't that be awesome? Some day... 

In the meantime, we'll do the next best thing - we'll study the countries and cultures of the world! I'm so excited about doing this and have actually been gathering resources since last year. I'll try to post my plans country by country and then come back and show some pictures of what we actually end up doing.

Our first week will be devoted to an introduction of the topic. We'll (hopefully) memorize Matthew 28:18-20:

Then Jesus came to them and said, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age."

We'll put photos in our passports. We also purchased world flag stickers that we'll put in when we visit each country. 

Cool books we plan to read:

P is for Passport: A World Alphabet

OH MY GOODNESS!! Have you seen these beautiful books from Sleeping Bear Press? They are truly wonderful. And if that's not enough, their website has EXCELLENT, free teacher's guides here.

How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World - this is a Five in a Row book (we LOVE FIAR!) 

Somewhere in the World Right Now

People by Peter Spier - these are always fun books

And a beautifully illustrated version of All Things Bright and Beautiful

This book is SO gorgeous that I actually considered buying two so that I could cut them apart and use the pictures as a border around the boys' room. I just couldn't bring myself to hack up a book! We'll use this book to remind us that a) the world we're going to study IS beautiful and b) God made it all!

We can't wait to get started!