Category: Geography

Famous Artists – Michelangelo

As part of our Italy topic the girls found out that Michelangelo was an Italian artist. They researched a bit about him and found out that he painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel which took 4 years to complete.

I thought it would be a challenge for them to try to paint how he would have had to paint this ceiling. They would also see why it took so long to do.

They soon realised that painting lying on your back is very difficult and they did say their arms hurt a bit after a short while, but they both managed to produce a painting. 😀

Tutor Group – Home Education Is Not Always At Home

Once a week on Fridays,  I go to a tutor group with other home educated children where we do formal Science, English, Maths and History/Geography.   We get given homework most weeks but we don’t get homework from Science or Maths on the week before half term.  School holidays still apply to tutor group.

At the moment we are learning about the internal organs of the human body in Science.
In English we are learning about A Midsummer Nights Dream and the language that Shakespeare uses in the play.
In Maths we are learning about coordinates and how to plot them various ways.
Last but certainly not least in History/Geography we are learning about Japan.

All of the subjects are interesting.

The lessons are an hour long and we have Science and English before lunch and Maths and History afterwards.

KS2 and KS3 are in a class together so the works is pitched somewhere between the two.  Some work is a bit harder for the younger ones in the group.  Those doing GCSE levels are put in a separate class.

Another really good thing is we (the students) have an input into what we would like to learn about.  So this term we as a group, chose Japan which we thought would be an interesting topic.

It’s a good time to see my friends and if you send your children or you come to the one I go to.  I will introduce you to my friends then you can sit with us.  (you may even already know someone there).

I would fully recommend it to everyone.

Matryoshka Nesting Dolls

As part of our Russia topic, the girls found out information on traditional Matryoshka Nesting Dolls and with that they decided they’d like to make some.

We decided that it may be too difficult to make a whole set out of wood, so chose to sew some out of felt instead.  We found a picture online and roughly copied what they looked like.

They didn’t take too long to do and they look really good.

Rainforest Cocoa Bean Madness Game

We have been learning about the Amazon rainforest.  Part of our topic was to create a game.

We brainstormed our ideas on a board about what we might see or come across if you were in the rainforest and then we chose the best ones to make our game.

We decided to make a game where you had to collect cocoa beans as you went through the forest, but you met good and bad things as you went.

We called our game Cocoa Bean Madness.

Firstly we cut out lots of cocoa beans and coloured stones and other bits, which we had printed from the internet.  We used the stones to design the game and we used various bugs, villages and animals as ‘to do’ spots.  We made our own spinner which worked well.   We chose and printed out our own explorers as our moveable piece.  We also decorated the board to make it more colourful, with trees, rivers and other animals and flowers.

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The rules were, you use the spinner to move around the board and every stone you land on you collect a cocoa bean, but if you landed on a tiger you had to go back to the start, or if you landed on a spider you had to lose all your beans.  If you landed on a village you collected 4 extra beans and if you landed on a parrot you get to go to the nearest village.  The winner was the person with the most cocoa beans when everyone had finished.

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It’s a lot of fun to play this game and the coolest thing about it is we created it and made it ourselves.

Christmas Around The World

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I thought it would be interesting as part of our Geography curriculum to add a Christmas Around The World theme throughout December.  I chatted with Elsa about how some countries might celebrate Christmas differently to us and that it would be interesting to see the differences in food and traditions of number of countries.

I downloaded some Christmas Around The World sheets off Twinkl, which gave us 12 different countries to research.

Then I found an amazing website where I thought Elsa would be able to find the information required without too much input from me.

She chose UK to start with as obviously it was the easiest one for her.

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She then found information about Denmark, China, India and France.

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This has been really interesting and we would have liked to have finished the others, but we went away on holiday in the last week before Christmas so ran out of time, however we will just have to do them next year. 🙂

Geography Post by Elsa – China

We have been home schooling since September 2015. We are semi structured so we do a number of lessons.

Mummy wrote about the curriculum before.

We have been following a curriculum by Erica at Confessions of a Home Schooler.

We have learnt about China and South Korea.

For China we learnt where it is, the capital city, language (I learnt to say hello in Chinese, which is Ni hao (Knee how)) and we also learnt some fun facts.

We made paper, then we wrote Chinese numbers up to ten on it.

We did a zentangle picture.

We also built the great wall of China out of Lego.

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We even tried Chinese food. My favourite bit was the egg noodles.

I have enjoyed learning about China.

 

Our Geography Curriculum

While mooching around the internet for inspiration I hit this fabulous website called Confessions of a Homeschooler. Erica, whose site it is has been home-schooling for a while now and therefore has some amazing resources. Most of them are free but she has some pay for ones as well, including a complete geography curriculum.

We also use her Daily Journal and Pre-R Daily Learning Journal (for Anna), both of which were free and I’ll do a blog about in the future.

Now I was always terrible at geography and I never got to really learn about where places are, their cultures etc., so I thought this is not only brilliant for Elsa, but also for me to learn more as well.

So I downloaded it, printed off the first 5 weeks of it and away we went.

Firstly, we made a passport to add the stamps of the flags of the various countries we will be visiting. (COAH is an American site so I downloaded the inserts from there and the front and back cover from Twinkl so we have a British passport).

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We continued with week 1, which was learning the different continents and oceans.  We also made a salt dough earth and labelled it with the different, oceans, continents and countries we would be learning about over the next year or so.

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We are missing out some parts of the curriculum but are following most of it and have done several countries so far and we will be blogging about them soon.

Elsa is loving this curriculum.