The new school year is in full swing, and I am so glad to be back in a consistent schedule! Last year we did an integrated unit study on the 5 regions of the United States, incorporating science topics, engineering, and all kinds of fun activities. This year, we are taking it up a notch and exploring the continents (sans Antarctica because we have already spent time on it in the past)! I am so excited for this world geography unit study because understanding that our world is made up of so many landmarks, cultures, and customs is incredibly important. It fosters respect and understanding to all the diversity this beautiful planet holds.
I will be posting throughout the year about each continent we explore, so this post is a general introduction to some of the things we will be consistently using and what we did for a review of continents, oceans, maps, and globes.
Resources
There are a few resources we will be consistently using throughout our unit. Some we will refer to for information and others for recording information we learn.
We are using these lap books by MsAPlus Teacher on Teachers Pay Teachers to record some of our learning. I will be tweaking some of them to meet our needs, but it gave me a place to land on.
In the middle of each lap book I am pasting these maps from History Gal to refer back to. I really like her maps and how clean and simple they are. We will be dividing most of our continents into regions to explore, so my son will color his maps accordingly as we go.
We will also be using reading passages for each continent by Tony the Tourist, which are a great addition.
These are the main atlases we will refer to for each continent. I highly recommend both! They are incredible resources that provide a lot of information and also some very unique illustrations that make them really interesting to look at. The Where On Earth Atlas has 3D-like illustrations, which is really cool! My son LOVED looking through it.
We will also be referring to this Timelines of Everything book put out by the Smithsonian and The Kids Book of World Religions as we “travel” around the world. The Timelines book provides some very unique timelines using visually stimulating illustrations. Truly unique and interesting! Of course we will be exploring many of the popular religions found in the world today, so The Kids Book of World Religions provides a good overview of these.
DISPLAY TABLE
I will be using our formal dining room table as our display table for each country we visit (since we never use our dining room table lol). I will be including books, photos, currency, these Montessori country cards from ArtDesignCollection (I love them because they are clean and simple and highlight the country within the continent we are studying), these continent cards from Montessori Print Shop, these country flags, and other trinkets we got on our travels (if we have been there). I feel this separate space to display things makes it more interactive and hands-on, just enriching the experience even more.
WEBSITES & VIDEOS
Some websites we will be using with every country and continent we “travel” to in our world geography unit study are:
*Globe Trottin Kids – a well-done, visually appealing site that includes basic facts about many locations. They are continuing to add more!
*Google Earth – An obvious choice when studying geography!
*Rick Steves Classroom – I love Rick Steves! This site has some great short videos about so many places around the world
*Destination World – This site by National Geographic Kids includes great intro videos to each continent and many countries
*Disney+ – There are many episodes about different places in the world! I spent an entire afternoon searching through them all and plugging them into our unit. Great stuff here if you have a subscription!
PASSPORT
The first time I made these I was in the classroom, teaching a 2nd/3rd combined multiage class. We did a year-long integrated Around the World unit and it was my favorite year teaching! I made these passports for the students to keep as fun little keepsake of all the places we “traveled” that year. So I decided to revamp it a little for this year. The first page includes general information my son fills out, just as if he were filling out a passport. I have a fancy stamp I used to stamp on that page to make it feel official, and then each page after includes general facts about each country we visit. We get a lot of this information from globetrottinkids.com or other websites. These are super easy to make. I whipped this up on PPT and had it all done in one day. Maybe one day I will get a version up in my TpT store, but I just don’t currently have the time.
Maps and Globes Review
My son is already pretty familiar with maps and globes, but we did a general review just to get us back in the geography mindset.
I used this PowerPoint presentation by Tony the Tourist as the base of our lesson on the different types of maps, which was great.
The resource included this types of maps sort that was a nice review.
For globes we did a review of longitude and latitude lines and explored a little of that with Google Earth. We also learned about map projections and how/why they differ. We used this great little hands-on activity from National Geographic’s Resource Library, which helped my son understand why some of the projections look the way they do.
That about wraps up the introduction to our world geography unit study! Stay tuned for future posts about what we did for each continent! They will be FULL of fun activities and resources that we used during our study!
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