Geography Plans

We started out the year trying to just do the mapping activities that are attached to Story of the World as our geography studies as this is very Charlotte Mason and I then planned to do some map drills however the kids really did not like this and would complain constantly. I have to say apart from when we did Montessori 3-6 geography we have been very erratic with this study and I have really struggled to incorporate geography successfully into our home education, hopefully the thoroughness of the Montessori 3-6 albums has been sufficient! (wink, wink, fingers & toes crossed)

So to try and counteract our geography woes I decided that we would try to make our own geography curriculum by mashing together several methods and curriculum I am always up for an experiment! So this year we after abandoning the mapping activities in the STOW I started following the geography element of the Waldorf Essentials Grade 4 curriculum. I will supplement this by using Montessori materials and activities. When we have finished this I plan to do a series of lessons on ecology for the kids as they have expressed an interest in this, again I will use a set of living books, Montessori activities and Waldorf style art.  So far this seems to be working I think the reliance on producing very colourful and personally relevant and interesting maps is appealing to my children, for my youngest if this is too much for her we will fall back on Montessori materials and presentations from the 6-9 albums. I am using a contents pages of an album that I have found on the Internet as my guide and I plan to put together my own presentations for the lessons. If I manage this I will of course put them on the blog.

For the moment though the kids seem to want to go over some of the Montessori presentations and use the activities that we covered on the 3-6 albums. They really like the large continent map that I made years ago on poster board and the animal continent mats that I made. This is fine I feel it’s important to review from time to time and it allows them to do something they enjoyJ.

So without further ado here are the animal continent maps the animals correspond to the animals found in the Safari Toobs & Wild Republic playsets/tubes. I used this initially with the presentations that relate to the identification of the continents and the animals that inhabit them. Your child would definitely need to be able to identity the continents and have done some work on which animals inhabit them.

Maps and Animal Mats

You can buy the Animal Tubes from below:

South America =Wild Republic Rainforest
Europe, the set that I bought was the Wild Republic Garden playset, which contained a red fox, hedgehog etc.. Unfortunately this is no longer available. You might try the Schleich animals, although these are expensive.
Asia = Wild Republic Asia
Africa =Wild Republic Africa Tube
North America =  Wild Republic North American Tube
Australasia = The Land Down Under
Antarctic = Safari Toob Antarctic