We are leaving our Africa Study
Carbon and I have finished studying Africa. Just in time, too, because he was starting to lose interest. I got him to sit down and watch one last documentary last week, and that was it!
We watched a typical wildlife documentary, but I also found a nice film made for elementary school kids, called East Africa for Kids. It is part of a series called Worlds Together that are basically the travel logs of a photographer, but they also had interviews and some nice map graphics. It was good for Carbon to see the cities and urban people, particularly, because so many of our resources don’t show those aspects of Africa at all. He was surprised there were cities.
Our other final Africa projects were a collage made from the National Geographics out in my garage:
And a banner of flags of African nations that we made out of construction paper. Carbon picked the flags he liked from a page of them at Enchanted Learning so they are a bit random. He liked the ones with stars on them, I think.
I’m a bit sad to leave Africa, but he’s very ready to move on. From here, we journey to Antarctica (his choice, he’s mad about penguins right now)! I hope it will be a fairly short stay, because I’m itching to “visit” the Pacific Islands next! I’ve always wanted to go to New Zealand (I had a penpal there when I was a kid, through one of those international penpal organizations), so I’d like to do a virtual visit.
New Zealand is a great place to visit and studying. I’ve lived there all my life and as much as I like traveling, it’s always great to return home here. If you do get to New Zealand on your study travels, feel free to email some questions to me.
Thank you, Gillian!
First I wanted to let you know that we are reading We All Went on Safari because of your first Africa book post. I mentioned it and you in my weekly book post.
How old is Carbon? Maybe you have told me but I’ve forgotten. My dd is three and I don’t think I could interest her just yet in a trip around the continents. Well maybe I could. I need to look at all your geography posts. It sounds like a great idea. Using your National Geogrpahics to make the collage is a fantastic idea. I love the flags. Is that a photo of a lap book or a photo album/scrapbook? Did you just do a one page spread or several?
OK, book suggestions. Have you read 365 Penguins? It is awesome. There is environmentalism, math, family and fun. Also, there is an awesome book I saw at the library entitled New Zealand ABCs : A Book about the People and Places of New Zealand by Holly Schroeder.
Carbon is about to turn 4 next month. Really, he just seems to be interested in traveling and the world right now, so I’m going with that. In one of my earlier posts (I don’t remember which), I talked a bit about my original plan, which was to explore our neighborhood and make maps of it. No interest what-so-ever from the C man. Instead he said he wanted to “go to Africa and ride a camel”. Now his stated ambition is to “go on a scientific mission to the penguins”. There is a globe at our local library, and he spends most of our library time pointing to spots and asking me what that is – he just loves geography.
In answer to your questions, that is a scrapbook, and we did just do the one page of collage. It’s going to be an “atlas”, so other pages in that section have photos of his other Africa projects and maps that we copied from a book.
Thanks for the book recommendations – I hadn’t heard of 365 Penguins yet, so that’s great!