Geography

I'm not sure why, but Monday has become our day to study geography. We didn't really plan it that way, but for some reason, it always seems easier to start the school week with geography, so we do. We spend most of the day on it. Sometimes I'll have Grace practice her handwriting skills by writing out some of the names of the countries we have studied or the names of Landmarks we've found. I also like to find free coloring pages online that coincide with what landmarks or countries we've talked about.
While in Minnesota, I found some really fun tools for teaching geography at a garage sale. There was a fan deck of cards giving info on each of the fifty states, a Jigsaw World Atlas, puzzles of the United States, a game for learning about the fifty States (which we have not pulled out yet), a "Goodnight America" book that's great for bedtime, an Egypt themed 50 piece puzzle, two Dr. Seuss books that I didn't even know existed, and a bunch of other stuff for the other subjects we are learning. I was one excited Mama. :)

This is the majority of what we've been using for Geography lessons.
The three puzzles to the left are all from the dollar section at Target. Two are 100-101 piece World and U.S. maps for Grace. The front puzzle is a 24 piece map of the world for Hope.
Obviously we have a globe and we use a deck of "Landmarks" cards, again from Target's dollar section. We pick out three new ones every few weeks and find them on the globe, talk about them, and find free coloring pages of them.
The "Where Do I Live?" book is from the library and is very good.
The Jigsaw World Atlas is a great book for the kids to work on puzzles together (has tiny little pics of the landmarks we've learned) while listening to Audio Memory songs listing countries.

I found this idea on Pinterest. Basically, we read through "Where Do I Live?" and made a circle for our planet, our continent, our country, our state/city, our street, and our house. The kids loved doing this project. I just used free clip art for the cut outs.

Love these books. They are very informative and we've taken some words from them to use as vocabulary lessons.

Also, because we are reading "There's A Map On My Lap" often now, we made maps of how to get from our house to our church and the kids now use them with their quiet time matchbox car box.