Thursday, January 3, 2013

Geography lessons - a trip to the USA

We are holidaying, mainly in Montana, for a few days. K has travelled from one end of Canada to the other but has never been out of the country before.

I like to add a little learning in with just about everything we do & travelling is a wonderful way to teach a sone geography. KJ, my 10 year old is learning about all the Canadian provinces in school right now so I tried to build on that a little & found a mapping activity which includes all the provinces & territory's. I found another of a fictitious community which teaches north, south, east & west. I printed off a Montana fun sheet with info & activities as well as USA & Montana maps & flags. Finally I printed off some geography word search puzzles. That should be enough to keep her busy for a while!

For K, I printed off the some maps & flags to colour then added in some math & printing sheets.

Before we left home we talked about the USA & Montana & found them on the map. We looked at the distances between places & talked about how we have provinces & territories & the USA has states.

We explained what was happening at the border & about her passport & how this was the point that we were leaving our country & entering a new one.

We talked about the differences in our money & K is excited to have some crisp new American bills in her wallet.

Once we arrived at the hotel I was given a simple map showing our room, the pool, the restaurant etc. K immediately decided it was her map & loves reading it & being our tour guide around the hotel.

We are also going to take in a couple of museums on our trip including a children's museum.

Once we get home in sure we'll do a few follow up activities as well!

How do you add learning activities into your holidays?




2 comments:

  1. My daughter is still too young to understand geography, but I'm sure she's got the idea that there are places that are close-by and others that are far away. Since she was born we travel a lot between Morocco (where we live), Italy (where is my family) and France (where is my husband family).
    Talking about learning activities...we've just got a free semester 1 of little reader program!!! I'm so excited! My kids loved the trial version, and I would have liked to buy the full one. I was waiting though, because is quite expensive. Thank to you, I asked for a reduction for children with special needs and to my great surprise we had 100% discount!!!!
    So thanks a lot!

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  2. That's great about the discount! It's such a fabulous program!

    It's wonderful that your daughter is able to travel so much. You can learn a lot from books, make etc. but actually experiencing it is the best way to learn.

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