Mapping The World with Art and Montessori Links

Yesterday turned out to be a big day of mapping around here. 

Hug wanted to draw a map of Europe using our Montessori Continent Puzzles which got me all excited (throwing out our scheduled Craft afternoon). I printed out a blackline master for him to label his map as he went. 

edit : A reader has pointed out that Hug has incorrectly labeled his map with Yugoslavia - which no longer exists. This happens when you have a second hand set of *old* continent maps which came with the country names actually written on the back of each piece. Whoops.

Then we completed the 3rd drawing activity from Mapping The World with Art, which tied right into both our study of Ancient Greece AND our travel plans for modern-day Greece. Yay! 

We played the video files on my mac. So cool being able to pause and rewind as necessary.

I pulled out the travel guides to add some extra details to mine :) 

Hug also drew and labelled two maps of Australia. 

While Lovely spent ages pouring over the rather tricky African puzzle, colouring each country on the blackline map in colours to match our Nienhuis puzzles as he fit in each piece. I love how kids choose to approach tasks sometimes :)

Here are a few links to other mainly-Montessori-inspired geography activities on my blog:

+ Continent Pin Map

+ Montessori Puzzle Maps

+ Our Sandpaper Globe! 

+ French map and flag plans

+ Our Continent Boxes

+ Continent Box: Antarctica

+ Continent Box: Asia

+ Continent Box: Australia

+ Continent Box Swap (Australia) 

+ Art, History, Geography in Action

+ Orange Hemispheres

+ A Walk in Our Neighbourhood

+ The Florida Parcel

I also like this site for printing maps :) 

What have you been enjoying at your place? x

Free Download | Olympics Medal Count Chart

I have designed a simple Olympics Medal Chart that I want to share with you! I couldn't find what I wanted online so I made one. You can download the (2 page) file here.

Keep a daily watch on the medal table here at the official Olympics site. The 2 page chart allows space for 11 countries to be ranked - if your country isn't in the top 10 you will probably want to include it also.

How I used it: 
+ We printed these medals (at 40%) to place over the boxes that say gold/silver/bronze and then I had each boy write his own column title to personalise it. Each page was laminated and then the two pages taped together (bottom of first to top of the second). Obviously laminating isn't a necessary step but we haven't had ours for long so it's still a bit exciting ;)

+ Next, I printed out mini flags to be coloured in. This is a great site that has printable flags from lots of countries, I clicked on each of the day's top ranking countries which takes you to a page where you can print a colouring page of the flag (Eg. clicking on Australia takes you here and then you choose the colouring page) - I printed one of these for each child at 25% to fit into the chart. I found that Kazakhstan (included in the chart on day 2) was missing so I googled and found one here (printed at 50%).

+ My boys researched the flag colours (either on wikipedia on my iPad) or on the World Map we have in our learning space *cough* kitchen. Once coloured, they cut out each little flag and wrote the proper country name and IOC country code on the reverse.

+ We have to finish our flag making this morning. I'll laminate these too & then we will attach them to the chart in current-day ranking with blu-tak (no idea what you call this outside of Australia!) and write each country's medal amounts in the appropriate box with a wipeable marker. Once set up, the boys can check the scores each morning and keep their own charts up to date.

+ Once the Olympics are over we will collate the final data and create some information graphs!

I'll post some photos as soon as ours are done. I hope you find use for them too! X