We are nearly ready to embark on our journey around the world! It’s funny how excited I am about our homeschooling unit plans for the coming months! 🙂
For the first week, we will be reading A Child’s Geography‘s first chapter along with having some discussions about the WHOLE world…not really focusing in on our first continent, Africa, until week 2.
Our Bible time for the week will revolve around John 3:16 and Acts 4:24. Sometimes we memorize these verses and say them so often (or hear them) that the impact or meaning of them almost gets lost. I don’t want my children to ever lose the meaning and depth of John 3:16, even after they are grown.
“For God so loved the WORLD that He gave His one and only Son, so that WHOEVER believes in Him, should not perish but have everlasting life.” John 3:16.
“Sovereign Lord, you have made the heaven and the earth and the sea, and everything that is in them.” Acts 4:24.
Jesus loves the little children
ALL the children of the WORLD
Red and yellow, black and white
They are precious in His sight
Jesus loves the little children of the WORLD.
We will be looking through books like Material World and Children Just Like Me at pictures of children from around the world. We will look at pictures of their homes, their foods and their lives, without focusing in on any one specific area. We will talk about how different all the children of the world look, how differently they eat and how differently they live…but that we all have something in common: our desperate need for Jesus and how much He loves each of us, no matter where we live or what we look like.
The first chapter of A Child’s Geography will lead us to discussing things like: what is a home? What is geography? What is a geographer? We will also learn things about this place called Earth that we call home. (You can download the first 3 chapters of A Child’s Geography by going here, if you’d like to check out this excellent resource.)
Here are the girls notebooks that I have ready to go for Monday! (I modge-podged the front and you can tell I got in a hurry and have some wrinkles. But overall I’m pleased with them…they still need another coat of modge podge.) These notebooks will hold all our work from our World Tour – maps, coloring pages, animal facts, copywork, narrations, flags, drawings…we will likely use rubber cement to put in all our pages. The notebooks are simply sketch books I picked up from walmart!
All of these stickers I got for CHEAP at Big Lots! (if you’ve never checked out Big Lots for scrapbooking supplies, it’s a great resource. You can’t bank on certain things always being there, but if you check them out semi-regularly, you’ll find some treasures for sure!)
We will be learning one of these continent songs to help us remember that there are 7 continents and what their names are! Here is a whole page of them if you’d like to choose a different tune! And here is another page with some cute ones!
THE CONTINENT SONG
(Take Me Out to the Ball Game)
Let’s name all of the continents.
There are 7 on earth.
There’s Europe andAsia and Australia,
North and South America.
Now don’t forget about Africa
And Antarctica, too.
For there’s 1…2…3,4,5,6,7 continents!
(Tune to “Did You Ever See a Lassie?”)
Do you know the continents? the continents? the continents?
Do you know the continents. There are seven in all.
There is ASIA and EUROPE and AFRICA and AUSTRALIA
There is NORTH and SOUTH AMERICA and ANTARCTICA, too.
If you have any great ideas to share for our World Tour…please leave me a comment!
I love the continents songs! Have you seen the book Galloping the Globe? I am going to be using it with Serendipity’s World Tour. GTG focuses on a handful of countries per continent, so for Africa we will be studying S. Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, Morocco, and Egypt. GTG can be used as a full curriculum, so it also has literature, science, bible and history. I think it’s a wonderful resource!
When you are done with all the continents you can play a game called Continent Cover-up. You need blank outline maps of all the continents. Fill in the landmarks, countries, cities, etc. that you studied and want them to review. Make cards….one card for each landmark, country, etc. To play, give each child a different map and some kind of Bingo markers. Shuffle cards. Pick the top card and call out the landmark. The child that has it can cover it up. The first child to cover 5 landmarks wins. Hope it makes sense…if not email me! 🙂
Candace, thanks for sharing the continent songs! I’m going to be using Galloping the Globe this coming year with my kids, and I’m planning to start with an overview of geography and the world as a whole. It will dovetail nicely with what I’m doing with science at the beginning of the year as Jaden has been begging to learn about the planets!
One thing I’m planning to try as we go through the different continents is to make salt dough maps so that we can incorporate the topography a little bit. I’ve never done it before, but I can’t wait!
This intrigues me since I organize a Geography Club for our homeschool group. I’m going to look into these resources you have listed. Thanks for sharing.
We studied world geography a couple of years ago. We LOVED the Material World book you referenced.
You may also like Window on the World. It gives a two-page, very readable, kid-friendly overview of a country or people, how God can be seen working in that country, and how to pray for that country. Just phenomenal!!
We also enjoyed GeoPuzzles. Each puzzle is a continent. The pieces are shaped like the countries on that continent (some smaller countries are combined on a piece). Very fun!!
This is going to be my first year homeschooling my K and 1st grader. I’ve enjoyed reading your blog and learned lots of things. This summer I’m warming up to it by starting with this Africa unit. I haven’t even gotten the main book yet (great link to the free downloads!) , but we’ve started with the picture books, and our library had most of them.
We did a great painting activity with the book Kente Colors…using brown grocery bags and tempera paint. I marked the paper off in squares and they painted a pattern on each row using the bright african colors…then once it dried, they went back and painted a pattern on the squares. Just like the bright materials of Africa! They turned out great, and I actually framed them and hung them on the wall.