USING CONTINENT NOMENCLATURE CARDS AND SOME EXTENSIONS
The more I do it , the more I love Montessori method. The fixed colors of continents make things so much simpler and understandable for young minds.
I found these FREE Continent Nomenclatures cards (in Montessori colors) at the Helpful Garden. I almost jumped out of my seat, because I just happened to find these just as I was thinking of making them by myself.
I also found another free one here at Montessori helper.
Well back to our activity…… I cut and pasted our cards as soon as I had the printouts in my hand. Once done Lil Muallimah did this…..She used her big map for reference, Mashallah!
Next we played a few games of Twister as posted in my last post and then we did these extensions…
Continent Match up with picture cards
Continent Match up with name cards
We did another activity… Continent tracing that you can check out from the link below:
Other related activities:
Our World Map
Coloring the large scale World Map
Flagging the continents
Push Pinning Continents
PUNCHING OUT CONTINENTS
I loved this idea since I saw it on several Montessori blogs. I didn’t have a big pricking tool or a fancy push pin, so I kept putting it off, until I had this Eureka moment and made my own push pins. Now why didn’t I think of this before…. DUH!!
I made our very own DIY push pins ready in less than ten minutes. I could not believe why I never thought of this before. I was not in favor of using the regular sized push pins. I could be wrong, but I thought the miniature sized ones were not only a safety hazard but would put too much strain on the hand on the lil ones.
Well here we are… our very own pushpins…. and cork board made by hot gluing two pieces of cork board to make a thicker surface for the pins to go through.
Lil Muallim # 2 sat and helped me make this as a wonderful assistant Mashallah. He even chose the colors.
He kept asking what they were for….and when I showed him , his eyes were gleaming with joy.
To my utter surprise he loved this activity so much that he ended up punching out three Africas in one sitting!!!
Other helpful posts on Montessori Push Pinning continents can be read here (Montessori Print) and here (My Montessori Journey).
More on making continent maps from the punched out parts can be seen here (Moveable Alphabet) and here (My Montessori Journey).
LARGE SCALE WORLD MAP
Lil Muallimah got to color her own world map. I got the 6 page print out from Owl and Mouse website. and Lil Muallim 1 and 2 put it together as a puzzle with Lil Muallim #1 folding the sides to match it up.
Got to love team work. It is an important lesson to teach kids……. helping out siblings. A true blessing when they do….Alhumdolillah!
She used her World Map to match the shapes of continents and colors. She was quite excited and did Australia and Africa in one sitting.
Just so she wouldn’t stress out if a bit of color came out of the lines, I oulined the continent with a think line at the borders as you can see in the picture below.
She did South America and North America next with others to follow.
Her neatness shows how much she prizes this 🙂
Asia is waiting to be completed for the past week 🙂 I think today will be the day.
Yup…we did finish it today. First when I laid it out and asked her if she wanted to do it she said no. A little while later, I sat down and asked her if she would like me to make the outlines. That’s all I needed to say. We were all done in less than 5 minutes 🙂
We also fixed some mistakes in the coloring by pasting a paper over certain parts (border of Europe and Asia) and reduced the size of Greenland. Different map projections have varying size for some areas. But that I’ll talk about in another post.
Next post will be about what we did with this map…. so stay tuned 🙂