Geography Unit - Chapter One and Two

Recently, I decided to add a mini unit on geography for J. I found an awesome inflatable globe (life size) and a core book - My World by Ira Wolfman. I found the book at a Goodwill so it did not have the included globe. I found the huge globe at Hobby Lobby. It was the same price as the smaller globes, so I said - why not? It does take up a lot of space but it is super fun.

We started the week out by reading the first chapter of My World. J made a flip book for vocabulary words that we come across during this mini unit. She started by defining the word Geography.

She read the book Me on the Map by Joan Sweeney. 

After that, she created her own map of her room, labels and all. She then turned the map of her room to a map that denoted the best hiding places in her room. She drew a map key and marked all of the great places to hide in her room so she can hide from her brother. 

We borrowed a ton of map books from the library and looked at several different maps.

We read about neighborhoods and landmarks in our neighborhoods. Then she began on her 3-d map of her street.

She made the houses from cardboard (fronts only). We talked about how the street was numbered and any landmarks that we could add to our neighborhood map. This idea came from Teach Preschool (link below).

She labeled where she lives on the globe (not sure the sticker will stay). We discussed where other family members lived as well as the country we lived in. 

She created this before during her Space Unit but we brought it out again for review - Me on the Map printable book (link below). It helped her visualize that she could be in several places at once....in the kitchen, in our house, on our street, in our city, in our state, in our country, on the continent, in our world, in our place in space.

In Chapter Two of our core book, landmarks were mentioned. So, to add to our study, I purchased the World Landmark Toob and printed some 3 part cards. J inspected each landmark and matched the cards to them

Then, she added them to our world map.

We also added a special person that we know who is going to Qatar soon. We will be learning about that country in her honor.

We brought out the landmarks all week while she learned the names of each.

And we researched them for a notebook page. We read about each one and wrote a fact or two on a plain notebook page. This page will go into her Geography notebook at the end of her unit. It was a good week, we learned a lot. Next week, we will continue our research about the landmarks and move onto chapter 3.

Links 

Inspiring Teaching Design - her TPT store has the great free printable that we used for our Me on the Map project.

Teach Preschool - super cute idea for making a 3D map of your street.

Suzie's HomeEducation Ideas - has the free printable 3 part cards for World Landmarks toob.