Me On The Map

This is a great way for kids to get an idea of where they are in the world.

Each circle zooms out into the big picture:
home, street, city, state, country, continent, planet

I have seen this over at Counting Coconuts, Finally in First, and the Activity Mom.  This is a fun activity to do with an atlas and we now have a good understanding of where they live.

International Day Favorites

Our homeschool co-op put on a fun international day and I thought these were super cool ideas.

Paris class:  Eiffel Tower made out of plastic cups, divided by square cardboard and then glued  together.

Mexico class: This was Olive's class and they made Indigenous Mexican Indian vests with paper bags from the grocery store and decorated them. Be sure to cut out a head and fringe on the bottom.

Spain class: These flowers were made out of tissue paper,  layer the paper, grab in the middle, and give a good twist, then tie together with a pipe cleaner.

Waddle like a Penquin

Olive and Jem enjoyed making these adorable paper penquins. They were easy to make! The idea came from www.kidssoup.com

And keeping with our theme, tonight we are having fish for dinner...the kind penquins like to eat.

Arctic is for polar bears, Antarctica is for penquins

It's a major freeze around here this week, like much of the South. The thermometer reads 22 degrees this morning. We have lived here a year now and I think my blood has run thin. Sometimes the cold weather really gets my brain working, it's a good thing, so we started a really cute unit on the "Arctic is for polar bears and Antarctica is for penquins."

I started by saying polar bears live up there (pointing up) and penquins live down there (pointing down.) O says, "you mean they live way under the ground." How confusing can one mom be? Then I got out our world map rug and they got it. They enjoyed putting their arctic animals where they belonged, did some fun goldfish math, while J played with some play foam like it was snow.

Not bad for a cold morning.