Surfing The Globe For Continents

In an earlier post, I mentioned that we ditched Marco Polo this term as I couldn't get my act together. I've been wanting to tie map work in with Columbus and our Vikings study, but, truthfully, it felt like I was putting the cart before the horse. Working with both a four and a six year old, I have my little guy who doesn't have a clue what continents are, and Grace, who used to know when she was at Montessori school two years ago, but needed a brush up.

I'll be brutally honest. Sometimes the computer is the best tutor. Yes, it would be nice to have beautiful maps the children have done by hand, in calligraphy, with elevations (tongue in cheek), but that seems like busy work at this age, and a lot of hair getting pulled at the roots. Really a book or two that cover the basics and a repetitive computer game is all we need.

So I located a very brief book at the library that cover the basics (sentence per page), and went online to find a game. Thought I'd share, as this technique has worked well for us, and we are almost ready to dive into states. We've been doing two different online continent games that can be done quickly, but with lots of fun:

National Geographic for Kids GeoSpy, which is great of tons of geography work, has a continent game. We also spend some time looking over animals in the Creature Features and finding out what continents the animals live on. (All of this takes less than 15 minutes for both kids to play the game two times and look up some animals.)

PlayKidsGames.com also has some great continent games that one can do in the form of puzzles.

We have printed out a world map in the National Geographic Atlas section, but I figured I didn't want them labelling the map until they felt confident in their continent skills and we could use it more for copywork that focused on geography.

Grace has also been enjoying math worksheets we found at GoogolPower.com that incorporates addition and subtraction problems with state geography.

If anything, all of this geography work makes me feel good, since the line I had in my Excel spreadsheet for our schedule, had nothing filled in under Geography. The "accomplisher" in me, finds satisfaction in filling that box in with purple now.