week four and five ~ geography

We spent two weeks on Geography but I could've spent FOREVER on the topic! There are so many ideas I have swirling around in my head about teaching Geography like, Little Passports (which is now a vendor with Visions!), listening to music, tasting food and fieldtrips galore! For now, while her and her brother are still pretty young, I figured I've got some time and I'll keep it simple. So we used the book Me on the Map as our catalyst and this great unit from teacherspayteachers.com.

I put up maps, we did activities with the globe, put together a puzzle of the United States, took a fieldtrip across state lines to Oregon, and read many, many great books.

Read Alouds: Here are just a few of the great books we read.

And this was one of the activities included in the Me on the Map unit from teacherspayteachers.com. We did a little each day and I was pleasantly surprised at the pictures she was able to come up with!

Thematic Poem: Here is the link to the poem. It's a familiar song and was pretty easy for Addie to pick up on and read (sing) independently. I was glad to have the word "California" in the text so she got more exposure to that big, long word!  

Word/Phonics Hands-on Activity: Laminated Cards: Many of you have seen me use these cards at our meetings. They were so incredibly easy to make and I get A LOT of use out of them. All I did was cut up some leftover scrapbook paper into 3x2 cards and then laminated them. Once they are laminated you can write on them with good old dry erase markers, then erase and rewrite. I use them for rhyming memory games, for building words and more. 

For the memory game I used words from our word families (jet/wet, best/west, leg/peg, hen/pen, etc.) If they rhyme, you get to keep them! For the building words activity, I asked Addie to build me the word "dig," then change it to "pig," then change that word to "pin," and so on. I would not set out more than six letter cards at a time though.