The World of Geography

As a college student in Utah I was shocked by how many of my fellow students were uncertain about the location of my home state, Oregon. I frequently heard, “is that the state north of California, or is it up by Canada? “ I guess I can’t really blame them, until a couple of years ago I only had a vague notion about the location of many states, and my understanding of latitude and longitude was a little fuzzy. Rote memorization is a big no-no in our house so I’ve found some other fun ways for the kids (and myself) to learn geography.

We stumbled on our first game by accident. One summer the boys developed a bit of an obsession with finding out-of-state license plates. Everywhere we went they searched for vehicles from far- away places. They needed a way to keep track of which states they had found so I printed off a map of the United States for each of them, and then when they found a state they would color it in. It didn’t take them long to realize that the smaller a state is and the farther away, the harder it is to find! (We did eventually find the elusive Hawaii and Rhode Island plates!)

My boys also like to collect state quarters. I got them each a map to display their collections. Not only have they pored over the maps countless times, checking to see which ones are still missing but they’ve learned a little bit about each state based on the engravings. I’ve found that learning about a place is the very best way to remember its location.

We talked about the Pilgrims landing on Plymouth Rock and then we looked at the outcropping of Massachusetts, making it easier to remember which state it is. We’ve talk about being able to see the Statue of Liberty from both New York and New Jersey, about Mississippi being next to the Mississippi river and about the Pioneers traveling across the Missouri River. Small, simple amounts of information give the names of places meaning and improve recollection. Sometimes we can’t think of a good bit of information to “hook” a state name on, then we try to remember something about the shape of the state. We used to confuse Indiana and Illinois until we decided Illinois looked like a swollen nose, which reminded us of “ill”.

Our favorite geography games are the “10 Days” series. There is a different game for each continent; the object of the game is to collect 10 country cards that you can place in the right order to take a 10 day journey. As each card is drawn we study the map to find its location and see if we can work it into our game strategy. Often when we’re done playing the game the kids like to just play with the cards, planning out all kinds of long exotic trips across the planet.

Another favorite in our house is a game we like to call, “Where in the World is Uncle Ryan?” My brother, Ryan, travels extensively and it’s always fun to look up his location on the map, learn something about where he is, and hear about his adventures when he gets back. Even if you don’t have an immediate family member who travels, friends, neighbors, and missionaries are excellent sources of information about different places around the world. Geography is literally all around us. Now that it has become more than a memorization exercise, it is one of our families’ favorite subjects!

H Day: Houses, Hands, Hearts, and Hugs

Today we went to Suzy's house for H day. She made these cute little H books for the boys to color and give to their daddy's. It had the lyrics to the song I'm So Glad When Daddy Comes Home, printed out with cute pictures to go with that the boys got to color. The song has lots of good H words in it that she pointed out along the way. Home, hands, hug....to name a few. And the boys were able to look at the words and pick out big and little H's.

After that, Suzy brought out a really cool set up of the song The Wise Man and the Fool Man. She had a paper house set up in a bucket of sand, and a paper house taped to a rock (which she put in the bucket after we were done with the sand part). She had filled an empty soy sauce bottle with water, and she let the boys take turns pouring "rain" onto the houses while we sang the song. Both boys thought that was a blast. Anything to do with water usually catches Scientist's attention, especially if he gets to splash it around. :)

The last activity was an instant hit because it had to do with building and with marshmallows. :) We helped the boys construct houses out of toothpicks and marchmallows. They loved it, and were even willing to have the help. Their favorite part of course was eating the marshmallows, which we made them wait to do until after we'd taken a picture. :)

Scientist's marshmallow house

Scientist was being kind of a stinker the whole day (except when he got excited about what we were doing) and wouldn't smile (or even look) for the picture.

All in all it was a fun day for letters. I have really enjoyed doing this every week with Suzy. It's always fun to see what she comes up with, and I think the variety makes it that much more fun for the kids too. I have "I" next week, cross your fingers for me to come up with something...

G Day: Goats Gruff, Grain, and Glitter Glue

Today was G Day.I decided to do a goat theme. I introduced the boys to goats by playing the song Bill Grogan's Goat off of the Silly Songs CD. Then I read them the story The Three Billy Goats Gruff. In an effort to save time, I made them each a set of stick puppets beforehand. I found the pattern online here. Since I didn't have craft sticks, straws worked nicely. So everytime I talked about one of the characters in the story, I had them hold up the character I was talking about. They seemed to like this, although they had a little bit of a hard time keeping their goats straight. Scientist's favorite part seemed to be the end. When he retold the story to Uncle Kyle later, he skipped straight to the part where the troll on the bridge gets pushed into the water and makes a big splash. Forget the goats, it was all about the troll and the bridge for him. :)

After our story we all went into the kitchen for some creative art. I had printed out a picture of a goat for each of them. I found those just doing a google search for goat coloring pages. Then I got out three different kinds of grain: oatmeal, rice, and corn kernels. Each boy got a glue stick, and the objective was to glue the grain onto the goat to decorate it. Well, the glue sticks didn't work as well as I'd hoped, and my regular Elmer's Glue was in the room where Sponge was taking a nap. So, we improvised. Scientist and I have been making Valentines, so the glitter glue was still out in the kitchen. We decided to use that. The goat glueing grain project didn't turn out quite how I had envisioned it. Scientist's kind of ended up a big sticky mess. But that's ok. It was still fun.

Sick Day Websites

We have been sick at our house for the last week. Someone forgot to tell Scientist that you are supposed to take it easy and rest when you're sick, so that your body can use its energy to make you well. One of the ways I found to get him to hold still for a small amount of time was to let him play toddler games on the Internet.

We did a google search for "toddler games" and came up with lots and lots of responses. Most of them I was not impressed with, but I did find a few that we will probably visit again. I think they have some educational value to them.

Minimops.com is the first website. It has five different games. The first is putting together dinosaur puzzles. The second is a band and you click on the different instraments to make them play. Third is drawing music. Fourth, and this one is my favorite, if a flower pot game. You get a picture of a seed, a flower pot, a watering can, and the sun with some clouds covering it. You have to pick the right order for planting the seed, watering it, and chasing the clouds away to give it sun. If you do, then a flower will grow in the flower pot. The fifth game is a dot to dot picture. All the games you can play with simple clicks of the mouse. Scientist seemed to catch on to all of them pretty quickly except the puzzles.

Fisherprice.com is the other website. This website has three different categories for Infants, Toddlers, and Preschoolers. The only one we've been to is the Toddler section. They have about 27 different toddler games. We haven't tried them all out yet, but here are a few of my favorites. The ABC Zoo. You push buttons on the keyboard and a cooresponding letter pops up. It says the name of the letter and then an animal that starts with that letter. So for example, "A, allegator begins with A" and then the little animated allegator chops it's teeth at you. Another one I liked was the Animal Sounds game. Two animals pop up on the screen and then you hear an animal sound. You have to click on the animal that makes that sound. There are also several different "Click and Color" games that Scientist really liked.

These aren't activities that we would do all day everyday, but when you're sick or just needing something "entertaining" that's still educational, we found that these websites were a lot of fun.

Letter F: Fish, Faces, Fingers

Today, my friend Suzy taught the boys about the letter F. First she gave them a paper with a big F and a little f on it. She talked about how fish starts with the letter F. The on the bottom of the paper she traced the boys' heels and then their fingers to make a fish. Then the boys got to color their fish. This is how Scientist's turned out. He wanted me to color the little f and kept handing me the colors he wanted me to color with. Scientist is getting better with his coloring skills. He's still no where close to staying in the lines, but he'll say things like, "I color eyes black." and then scribble black over the eyes. So we're coming right along. :)

The next activity Suzy had, I thought was so cool! She had cut out four circles. On one circle was an empty fish bowl, on another was a head without a face, on another was a fish and plants, and on another was a face. We taped the empty fish bowl and the fish back to back with a straw in between, and the same with the head and the face. (Make sure you get the orientation right or it won't work.) Then when you twist the straw between your fingers fast enough it creates the illusion that the fish is in the fish bowl and that the face in on the head. It's really cool, and the boys loved it.


After that Suzy passed out Shark Fruit Snacks, and we loaded all the kids in the car and took them to Jay's Jungle, a pet store, and let them look at the fish, turtles, snakes, rats, hamsters, birds, and puppies, that they had in the store. All the kids loved it, even Sponge. So I'd say F Day was quite a success.

Hole in your Hand

Here's a fun experiment we stumbled onto today. Roll a piece of paper into a tube, place the tube up to one eye. Keep both eyes open and focus on something across the room. Now place your hand in front of your free eye so that it touches the side of the tube. Ta-duh! There's a hole in the middle of your hand! The kids thought this was a hoot and kept playing with it for quite a while. They tried using different colored paper, poking something into the hole and seeing if they could see holes in other solid objects. It was a great chance to discuss how our eyes process images and a hole lot of fun!

E Day: Elephants and Eggs

The holidays are over, so it's time to get back on track with our letter days. It was my turn this week to do "E". I decided to do an egg and elephant theme. Scientist really loves to paint, and we haven't gotten it out in awhile, so I picked activities that would allow us to get out the paint. When I was little, my Grandma did this activity with us where you poke a hole in each end of an egg, and then blow out the yolk. You are left with a hollow egg. We used to glue little squares of tissue paper on it and then paint a clear coat over it. I thought tissue papaer might be a little advanced for two year olds, so the plan was to just let them paint their eggs.

The night before Aaron helped me do some prep work. We washed the eggs first and then poked holes in each end and blew out the center of the eggs. FYI, it helps a lot if you stick the pin inside the hole and swish it around to break up the egg yolk.

Then, since these are supposed to be decorative eggs, we made egg stands to put them on out of the egg carton. Then we covered the stands in tin foil so it would look fancy.

I know it's a long long way from Easter, so I modified a little bit and decided that these eggs could be Valentines eggs. Ya, ya, I know, Valentines Day is still a ways off too, but it's the closest holiday we've got. So I found some heart stickers that the kids could stick on their eggs after they were painted, to help spice things up a bit.

That was the egg part. For the elephant part, I got the awesome idea to make a paper sack elephant puppet off of a website a friend shared with me called ABC Stuff. It's an awesome website and has multiple activity ideas for each letter of the alphabet. She had a link on there to a sight that had a pattern to print out to make an elephant puppet. I didn't think cutting would go so well for the kids, so I printed out the patterns on cardstock and cut out the pieces for them and made them each their own little envelope (whatever it takes to stick in another E word right?) with all of their elephant peices in it.

That was all the 'before' work. And I think having it all ready made the day go a lot smoother. When our friends got here, I sat the boys down in special "story chairs" (our banana chairs, I hoped having special chairs would help their attention spans, it only sort of worked) and read them Horton Hatches the Egg by Dr. Suess. Which just so happens to be about an elephant who tries to hatch an egg. Not only that, but it's got a good moral (patients and hard work pay off in the end) as well. Double winner.

After that we headed to the kitchen to paint! Oh, I should mention, the apples on the table are for "Eating", which starts with "E". Couldn't think of any egg snacks that sounded good, so I got creative. The boys painted the paper sack first. They painted it gray. The only color I got out to begin with, so that at least the body and the face would look elephantish. You'll see what I mean in a minute. When they were done with the sacks we put them aside to dry and got the elephant pieces out of the envelopes. Then I got out more colors so the boys could be as creative and artistic as they wanted to be. :) They didn't let me down either.

Here's Scientist painting his elephant ear a nice mix of red and orange. We haven't used brushes very much with him, but let me tell you it's LOTS less messy than finger painting. And he still loved it. So I think from now on I'll have him use the brush for inside, and save finger painting for outside. It was also a nice addition to have the garbage sacks taped to the table. I usually just spread newspaper, and it's more of a hassel, and paint still always manages to get on the table.

When the boys were done with the elephant parts, we put those aside to dry. I took their painting plates away, and got them different ones with only Valentines Day colors on it. Then gave them their eggs. They seemed to have a little bit more trouble painting the eggs because the eggs kept rolling away from them. But I think they enjoyed that too. Once the eggs were nicely painted, we washed up and let the boys down to play while everything dried.

They had a good time playing together, which they always do. Unfortunately the paint did not dry fast enough, so we had to send everything home with Suzy in pieces to have them put together after nap time. We put ours together after nap time too. Here's how they turned out:

Not quite as professional looking as the elephant puppets the lady on ABC Stuff made, or the eggs I used to make with my grandma, (and actually, the ABC Stuff page did some blown eggs as well, that are really well done), but hey, for two year olds, not too bad. :) And we had fun doing it, which is really all that matters.