My Kids (2-4 yrs) and Geography

My children love geography.  

 

It started with my son at age 3; we were in the middle of a Solar System unit study when he became very curious about Earth. I introduced Earth by starting large and simple: Earth is made of land and water. Later, I purchased an Usborne Book to help teach (Usborne are my favorites) and included a map of the world.

 

Next, I introduced continents. We started by singing a 7 continents song to the tune of "Are you Sleeping?" Here's my daughter waking me up to this song at 25 months:

 To extend on our continent work, we referenced another book we own: 

I printed animals from each continent and laminated them for matching, and sometimes I'd bring out Toob Animals for matching:

 We just took our time on each continent - sometimes up to two weeks - as there were many new animals to research.

When my son and I found the Hug A Globe at our local learning shop, we had to have it. My son still sleeps with this at night.
 

On the bottom of our world map is a list of countries and their flags. My son wanted to look at the flags every day. I had no idea where to go with this, so I researched it ...

For Christmas, when he was 3.5 yrs old, we purchased the Flags of the World, and a miniature globe:  

My son now knows 10 country flags and their dot on the map.  

I did a Google search and printed flags for matching. I didn't know if he would enjoy this as it seemed so simple. However, simple can be very rewarding.  

Now that we were on to flags and countries, I wanted to extend on this and explore each country a little deeper. I thought it would be fun to try Little Passports.

 

This just makes it easy on me ... they send my son information on a new country each month. And, slowly but surely, I'm now able to focus on putting together continent boxes.

I am in love with how these are turning out and will post about this, and open them up for you to see what's inside, very soon!

 

How are you exploring Geography with your little ones?