Knit in my womb: Continent study

This year I decided to study a continent every month during the school year. One wall in the dining room has been set aside as our continent wall:

As we get more things for the continents, I will add them (this time I added all the flags after this picture was taken to the wall). The top purple box is my continent box. Since this is our first year, we just have some basic items, but I'm hoping to add cool things from that country when I'm able in the future. I'm sure we'll use these boxes for many years. So...what's in the box...

I printed out a bunch of items from www.montessoriprintshop.com, including 3 part cards for landmarks, instruments, and animals. There's a tutorial somewhere on there on how to use their 3 part cards. I also bought and printed their geography folder for Australia. The map on top is from a game we have called Where in the World.

The bottom shelf in the top picture has all of our library books that I got out on Australia. The blue box next to it is everyone's favorite. It's our continent sensory bin.

I put a bunch of beans, measuring cups, spoons, flags and the Australian Land Down Under Toob animals.

This got MANY hours of play by everyone!

We did one or two activities every week (5 weeks total). Here we are the first week coloring the continent. The second week we added pictures of animals on our picture. The third we added the one and only saint (well, Blessed Mary MacKillop) onto our picture and talked about her life.

We did a few lessons with our 3 part cards. They really liked these. The animals was the only one the preschooler liked...he matched the animals from the toob to the cards.

Here's doing the landmark cards

He decided his favorite part of Australia was the Great Barrier Reef...so we explored it more! We watched You Tube videos on it, painted it and then he wrote his first essay on it and drew a picture :) It turned out very well.

When learning our instruments, we watched some videos on didgeridoos. You must watch these. They are so neat. Three summers ago we were blessed to have a man who learned from the Aboriginees come to our little local library and play for us.

Of course we also had to watch some extra Wild Kratt videos on Australian animals and make boomerangs!

For our final Australian treat, we made Pavlova for dessert one evening. It was super tasty!