AFRICA in a Nutshell

I love making materials for our geography lessons!  It gives me the freedom to choose subjects, topics to touch, and most of all it gives me the freedom to put depths into it.  Now my latest creation is the Africa Continent Study! It is loaded with activities for you and your little ones or students. (Click the image or this link, Africa in a Nutshell to go to my shop)

So what’s included in this learning material?

The Animal Kingdom

We love using our printables and one of which is our Animal Kingdom cards.  We worked on this last year and hopefully we get to use it again this summer.  You can read about our lesson here.
When your kids are a bit old, it would be nice to introduce them to the much bigger picture.  This will help them understand that a starfish is NOT a fish and that sponges are animals!  Mavi learned a lot from this lesson and help him understand why animals are classified.

The file includes:

• The Animal Kingdom MASTER Chart in A4 SIZE
• Chart with pictures only (no labels) in A4 SIZE
• Chart with labels only in A4 SIZE
• Chart with no pictures and labels in A4 SIZE
• 15 cards with pictures and labels to form the chart
• 15 cards with pictures and no labels (for 3 part card use)
• 15 label cards (for 3 part card use)
• Matching definition cards

Hope you like it!

Ancient Egypt Study: How to Make a Papyrus

Oh this one is an exciting activity for Mavi!  He could not believe that he actually made paper!  Presenting to you how we made Papyrus out of our parchment paper.  This is in line with our Ancient Egypt Study (The Study of Ancient Egypt).

Materials needed:

• Glue mixture. (mix 1 cup of flour with 2 cups of water)
• strips of parchment paper.  You can use anything you like here, but I decided to use parchment paper to make it more realistic
• Aluminium foil
• kitchen towel
• rolling pin

This was our setup. I covered the area where we’re going to work so it won’t stick in the wooden table.

Geological Time Scale with Safari Toobs

Last year, I was able to purchase the Cambrian and Prehistoric Life Toobs from Amazon because it was on sale.  I’ve always wanted to have them so we can use the figures in our Geological Time lesson. Remember the first time Mavi and I had the lesson at home? It was a hit! He love it so much! His interest came to light when he started reading the Universe Trilogy:

Born with a Bang

Lava to Life

Mammals who Morph

After which he started to do his own “timeline” by connecting the dots in the stories (based on the books).  Because we didn’t have the appropriate figures, our representation of the timeline is incomplete.  And finally, these toobs were on sale and we just have to finish what we started!

So here are the additional toobs that we used (aside from the dinosaur toobs)":

The Cambrian Toob. Loooove them! They are so colourful and the details! OMG!

The Prehistoric Life Miniatures.  Love this well!  Too bad it doesn’t have enough animal figures on it though. But we love it anyway.

So here are my boys, Mavi putting things in action.  I made the paper mat. I simply added the label on the side.

And Vito, taking away the items from the mat and destroying everything that Mavi has created LOL.

Ahhh… here it is! I finally got the chance to snap a photo of Mavi’s work while the little one is napping.

Pictures below how Mavi would research each of the figures.  Yes I’m beginning to teach him to do research using the web.  He’s getting there, he loves reading out loud his discoveries (soon I’ll teach him how to take down notes!).  I told him we can do research in books and in the internet nowadays.  I also made labels for each figures.  They are actually etched on each but it so difficult to read. 

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