I just love impromptu lessons!  I think the kids retain and enjoy a lesson more when it’s spontaneous and even better, something they think of all on their own.  One day recently, Parker was looking through some landmark cards that we got in the dollar bin of Target last summer.  Each card has a picture of a famous landmark and a description of the landmark.  The card also shows what country the landmark is in.  After looking at the cards for a few minutes he decideds to get out his Leap Frog Globe.  With the globe, he could listen to music from the country, learn it’s capitol, and even how far by plane the landmark is from Virginia.  Pretty neat!

Tags: geography

Our family loves jigsaw puzzles AND our family loves geography/maps – put the two together and you have a fun-filled afternoon!  Our GeoPuzzles arrived yesterday and we were eager to get started!  Parker’s love of geography was enhanced at his old Montessori school.  They had this neat activity where the child would use a large push pin and ‘punch’ out a country that was traced on construction paper.  Once all the countries of a continent were punched out then the child would glue the countries in place on a piece of poster board.  Here are Parker’s maps that he completed.

He’s very proud of his maps and rightly so!

Today we put together all the GeoPuzzles – my main quibble with them is that they do not divide the puzzles by continent.  Instead of North and South America they have US/Canada and Latin America and they include the Middle East in with Africa; but overall I like the puzzles.  They are MUCH cheaper than real Montessori puzzles which run a minimum of $21 per puzzle and have an outrageous shipping cost.  Here is the result of our work

Tags: geography, maps, Montessori, puzzles