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We’ve had so much fun with our Egypt geography. Some of our ideas have come from the Tapestry of Grace curriculum, and some we’ve added from other sources.
Since we’ve been studying about the importance of the Nile and it’s annual flooding, the idea of building our own Nile River and flooding it was extremely appealing. And anything that involves mud is high on the list of FUN at our house right now.
Detailed directions are provided in the above mentioned book, but here’s the gist. Find a pan, fill it with sand. Add black soil for the fertile flood plains or Black Land. Build a Nile River from aluminum foil. Wedge it into the dirt and weight it with stones. Add grass seed or other fast-sprouting green to the “Black Lands.” Flood regularly.
Planting seeds along the Nile
Flooding the Nile
What a blast! The kids regularly beg to “flood the Nile,” and we were all just giddy when our grass started to sprout.
We love geography: maps, globes, atlases, all of it! But we’ve definitely taken our geography to new heights with our Egypt study. It’s one thing to make a map, but it’s something entirely different to get to eat your map after you’ve made it!
We’ve been working on learning the map of Egypt. Each day we’d review the different places on the map that I wanted them to remember. The first couple of days, we do this with the Teacher map that includes the names and locations. We finished the week reviewing with a blank student map. Finally, I finish the map work by having each of the kids label a blank map. I got the idea from The Jobe Journal to actually create labels for the kids to stick onto the map, since neither of my kids are really at the age for filling out blanks on a map. This has worked great! They love “stickers” and it gives me a good idea of what they are remembering.
But then came the real fun. I baked some cookie dough and got out the frosting.
We frosted the entire cookie first. Our desert or “Red Lands” were decorated with colored sugar sprinkles. The kids (with a little oversight and direction) frosted the fertile flood plains (or Black Land), the Nile River, and the Nile River Delta. I had originally planned for our pyramids to be chocolate chips, but it wasn’t until after we finished frosting our cookie that I realized I was out of chocolate chips. After a brief moment of panic, I remembered that I did have tootsie rolls. So I pinched off tootsie roll and shaped it into pyramids for the kids to place on their cookies.
After all that hard work, I was barely able to get pictures before the kids were begging to “eat Egypt.” Let’s just say, this is one map they won’t forget soon.
We have had so much fun with the Olympics this summer. At the end of our geography study, the Olympics have been the perfect way to reinforce a year’s worth of learning. And of course, everyone has such brilliant ideas to offer.
For the Opening Ceremony, I had the kids so excited: a runner with a torch and flags from all the countries. I had a coloring page for them to work on when the ceremony got a little slow, and I had pages of flags for them to find and mark as they saw them on the program. Of course, I failed to remember that the Parade of Nations and the torch all took place after the ceremony, and that the ceremony takes FOR-EV-ER to conclude. So, the poor kids had to go to bed before the good stuff, and we had to tivo the rest for another night of fun. But they liked their coloring page anyway.
We continued our fun a couple of days later with some sugar cookies and frosting. The kids got out their passports from our geography study and picked flags to decorate on the cookies. I confess, I did help quite a bit with this project. Mostly, I frosted the flag outlines and let them do the filling in. Any fancy details I also took over. But the kids still loved the project, and it really helped to review our flags.
(I went for simple on this project, so I bought packaged sugar cookie dough and packaged icing. You could definitely save money by making your own, but I wanted the bulk of my time to be spent on icing the flags not baking, at least for this project.)
Then, we finally got to the Parade of Nations. Surprisingly, Oldest didn’t care for marking the flags at all. He took a seat and just watched, helping every now and then, while Middlest absolutely loved the project! She rolled and jumped and scrambled from one page to the next marking off flags with her (can you guess?) pink crayon. I had close to 50 flags printed off, and she found every one of them.
It was definitely a fun kick-start to the events, but just a beginning to all of our Olympic fun.
Our geography is finally coming to a conclusion. We got really derailed with the arrival of Littlest, which took us much further into the summer than what I expected. But it’s been a fun journey, and no one has complained that our tour has taken a few extra months.
We just wrapped up South America with a study of Peru, Brazil, and the rainforest. Expedition Earth has a fantastic rainforest diorama to construct, but it was just a little bit more than what I’m capable of tackling right now: deconstructing and organizing the school room, preparing next year’s plans, trying to salvage my milk supply for Littlest, plus the “normal” every day that Life throws at ya’.
We’ve had a ton of fun with this app. It comes with lots of games and puzzles that feature animals of the rainforest. There are also tons of articles about the rainforest and its plants and animals. Another big favorite were all the photos and videos of the rainforest.
Memory Match
Then we let the kids watch an episode of I Shouldn’t Be Alive that featured a couple of guys lost in the Amazon rainforest.
The kids also learned the different layers of the rainforest: emergent layer, canopy, understory, and forest floor. It would have made a terrific notebooking page, but I tell you, I’m just having trouble getting to everything right now. So we studied from our app and a few pictures. Maybe another day we’ll be able to make our diorama and notebooking page.
Finally we turned our binders into bound books. Since my pro-click binding is editable, I can add the last pages once they are completed. (But I needed the kids binders to get ready for next year, so this helped free up some space.)
North America is our last continent. We’ll cover Canada and Mexico. Then, conveniently, our church is putting on a music camp and performing a musical about America. It will segue perfectly into the tail end of our tour. It’s been a fun and memorable journey. Nobody’s asked me, but our geography study was definitely the favorite part of MY school year!
Slowly but surely we’re getting back into a routine, and I’ve gradually added our geography back into the mix. And what a fun country to start back with: Australia!
In addition to our usual activities (notebooking the country map and the flag, Children Just Like Me, etc.), I was able to throw in a few fun extras.
We read a Magic Treehouse book.
We drew koalas using the promotional video from Mark Kistler’s online art school. (The Homeschool Buyers Co-op is running a fantastic deal this month on a subscription to his lessons [$40/year/family].)
Middle-est's renditionOldest embellished his drawing with several koalas during a thunderstorm. Notice all of their sad, frightened faces?One koala even made it out to the sidewalk.
We decorated boomerangs (print out from Expedition Earth), cut them out, and pasted them to cardboard. After looking at a couple of examples of boomerang designs on the internet, we concluded that an animal goes in the middle (kangaroo or lizard) and a dot-design fills the outside ends.
He's really into drawing lately. I googled a video lesson on how to draw a lizard just for this project.
Oldest's finished work
Dad even contributed to the day with his REAL boomerang from Australia, given to him by a friend who had gone there on a mission trip.
Then, we finished the week by watching Coral Reef Adventure on Netflix and completing a notebooking page (I’m learning to make my own! Future post idea for sure.)
coral reef coloring page from EnchantedLearning.com
The arrival of Littlest has us behind in geography, but all that means for us is we’ll be taking our adventure into the summer (and my original plans of U.S. geography will have to be postponed.) Next stop: South America!
*Disclaimer: I have included my affiliate link for Homeschool Buyers Co-op. What that means is that your membership and purchases through my links will earn points for me to use for homeschool products at the Smart Points Vendor Hall on HBC’s website. Thanks!
As we head into the countries of Europe, I’m picking up the pace a little. For one, I’d like to complete the continent before Baby gets here. Two, there are a lot more countries in Europe to cover (I had selected three from each continent, but how do you cover only three European countries?). So, instead of a two week study, we’ve shortened the next few to only one week, but still packing in a ton of fun.
First, we learned our geography and completed our notebooking pages. The Greece flag was a little tricky for them, with so many alternating stripes. And it wasn’t perfect on the first try, but a little white paint covered the mistake rather well.
We read about Yannis in our Children, Just Like Me book. As always the kids were most interested in what his religion was (Greek Orthodoxy) and what he ate (ham souvlaki in a pita wrap).
Now, my husband and I are pretty big fans of Greek food. So I took this as the perfect opportunity to capitalize on my children’s interest.
We found a casual Greek restaurant and embarked on the experience. What do you order the kids at a Greek restaurant? Well, I didn’t want them to get confused when we studied Italy, so I stayed away from pasta. Instead, we ordered a couple of appetizers: pita bread with tzatziki sauce and chicken souvlaki (essentially, grilled chicken on a stick). It was the perfect kid’s meal! They loved it all, and my son was even brave enough to try a bite of gyro (pronounced “Year-o”, per the menu).
Greece really made an impression on my son. He loved the food, quickly learned to find it on the map, and decided he definitely wanted to go there some day. In the meantime, he’s asked if he can mail Yannis one of his Bibles. I love getting to know the heart of a child!
Our next stop on our geography adventure was the country of Russia, and a transition from the continent of Asia to the continent of Europe.
I was a little concerned that our geography song might be a bit difficult for them, but both of them did really well with the mouthful of words. Honestly, I think they liked it. Something about childhood that revels in a mouthful of apparent jibberish, the satisfaction of saying a difficult word whether or not you know what it means.
The Russian Federation,
Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan,
Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan,
Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Belarus,
Azerbaijan and Armenia—
These are the countries of the former USSR.
We tackled our typical notebooking pages, learned about a girl named Olia who studied dance in Russia (Children Just Like Me), and prayed for the missionaries and unreached peoples. Providentially, one of the daily emails that I get for the unreached people groups happened to be on a people-group in Kyrgyzstan. So, I pulled up the email during our prayer time and read about the Kyrgyz, who have just recently received the Bible in their language. After several prayer cards of people without the Bible throughout our study, my son got REALLY excited about this one. He was thrilled that the people finally had a Bible and, completely on his own, mentioned it every time he prayed that day. One of the highlights of this year has been to see the tender hearts of my kids react to the unsaved in other countries; their passion for the lost always ignites my own passion.
On the last day of our study, we has some particularly fun activities planned. We made our flip-books of Russian animals…
coloring the cover to her flip-book
…and classified our Russian animals in our notebook.
Then, we made Russian Tea Cakes. I’d happened upon the recipe in one of my books awhile back and saved it for our Russian study, knowing my kids would absolutely love them. The recipe was a very simple one (which was why I was bold enough to try it, and even then I was out of walnuts and had to do my best without them).
1 cup butter (softened)
1/2 cup confectioners sugar
2 1/2 cup flour
1 tsp. vanilla
3/4 cup walnuts
Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Cream butter and sugar. Add flour, vanilla, and walnuts. Form into 1-inch balls and place an ungreased baking sheet. Bake for 12-14 minutes. Watch carefully! While warm, roll in additional confectioners sugar. Yield: 4 dozen.
The kids helped me to count and measure, then roll the balls and place them on the cookie sheet. Of course, we had nowhere near the 4 dozen that the recipe said we’d have, but there was still plenty to go around.
While the cookies were baking, the kids played with our Animal Jigsaw Atlas, piecing the animal puzzles together for the continents that we’ve covered so far (Africa and Asia).
(Notice my little chef in her adorable hat and apron.)
Then, I was actually brave (i.e. foolish) enough to let the kids roll the warm cookies in the powdered sugar. Oh!!! I must confess I was very tense and nervous, but overall we didn’t do too badly. (Forgive me for not getting any in-action photos, but I wanted my full attention on the project at hand.)
And finally, it was time to consume! I didn’t have any caffein-free hot tea for the kids, so we settled for milk and Russian Tea Cakes as the kids reflected on Olia’s favorite meal of bliny (pancakes served with sour cream). We all agreed that we liked the tea cakes better than the idea of bliny.
