World Geography Luggage Week 1

So what were we doing for our first week of homeschool? Well our luggage was packed with a lot of fun stuff.   It will take longer than just this week, but here's what we focused on this week.  We also did the 'regular' stuff like spelling and math.  We're using All About Spelling and Life of Fred respectively for those subjects.







Flat Stanley's Original Adventure - This is so popular I've had to make a 2 chapters a day rule otherwise it would have been read already. Homeschool Share has a fun little lapbook for free here that we're doing (check their whole list, they have tons of nice free lapbooks).  The Flat Stanley website is supposed to have a PDF for teachers to download but it won't download for me.  I did print out two of their Flat Stanley's to add our lapbook.  I taped the hands together to make two mini books, one for describing Stanley's character and one for a recap of the book in Toad's words.

Montessori Continent cards - This was a free download from Montessori Helper.

Montessori Landforms cards - This was a free download from Montessori Materials.  I'm supplementing this activity with a few worksheets from a Scholastic download, Success With Maps, grade 3.  Until 8/27/12 they're having one of their $1 sales.

Cartography book - This was a download I paid for from Montessori Print Shop.

Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne - We always have an audio book going in the car and this is what we started this week.

World Map Labels - This was a free download (Globe, Continent and Ocean Map Labels) from Montessori Print Shop.

For the record, I don't laminate everything we work with.  It is extra effort and expense but I was expecting to use many of these things all year and wanted them to last.  I also went to the effort and expense of labeling and putting all our various projects in their own envelopes.  I would like things to be better organized this year than last.  I'm trying to provide a format for Toad to keep his work clean and organized himself.  So everything has it's place.  Hopefully, it's also easier for me to store and find when we need to pull it out again too.  I used regular manilla envelopes and printable Avery labels from the office supply store.

Below was some of our reading for the week.  I chose the DK atlas because I liked the layout.  There's many out there that are good.  Our family didn't have one so it was a need.  Steve Jenkins has many great books illustrated with handmade papers.  If you haven't seen his work, pick one up.

It was a good week!