MEXICO, the place you thought you knew

Tuesday, November 26, 2013

It is so hard to to have after "school" activities lately as it gets dark early in the afternoon. Mavi would ask me why we're doing school in the evening when in fact it is just three in the afternoon. Though we still have a lot of things to cover up before the year ends I'm not letting myself stress out and be pressured of my "to dos". As I always say, the journey of our schooling at home is all about the experience and fun that we have NOT entirely about the output.

Okay, enough ranting. This post is all about our Mexico Unit which we started last week. The materials that we used in this unit are the following:

Flags of North America
Flags of Australia/Oceania
My Adventure Book (North America Edition) (read about it here)

We started with flags. We review the countries that we have studied so far and compare them. As you can see we work on the 3 part cards, and country-capital city matching cards. These are all included in the printables mentioned above.

We talked about the colors used in the Mexican flag, and Mavi discovered that Australia and the United States uses the red color as well! So we discuss the meaning of the red color (and why it is always used in flags) and the green color and what it means to the history of Mexico.

Aside from coloring, we made a Mexican flag similar to this project. We used tissue paper and a cardstock.

Mavi made an eagle at the center of the flag representing the coat of arms of Mexico.

Moving on... we also worked on the biomes of Mexico. We did this with Australia, and I decided that we should try a different approach this time.

We made a map of Mexcio (biomes) using PlayDoh. We use yellow for desert and light green for deciduous and tropical rainforest (I can't find a darker shade of green to represent the tropical rainforest). Our maps (left) and Mavi's (right) show below.