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They now have to share with the current project: salt dough maps of an imaginary land. Tapestry of Grace suggests making these to learn geography terms at the beginning of the year. The kids made them last week. We are letting them dry and will paint them tomorrow or Friday. You can go to this link to see more pictures if you're interested:

Salt Dough Maps

For this project, I had Nathan look up all of the suggested geography terms online and find pictures to go with them. He put all of that into a Word document and we printed it out to use as a reference. I think I would suggest using Enchanted Learning's Landforms glossary instead, although it was very helpful to have real photos to look at. Nathan did a great job!

Since we have gone over geography landforms before, I let the kids choose 7-10 landforms to include on their maps. I bought each student a cookie sheet from the Dollar Store that we will reuse. In hindsight, I should have put cardboard down so that we could remove the maps from the cookie sheet. Maybe we'll just take pictures or save one of them for the Unit Celebration instead of keeping them all. You can also use cardboard or heavy paper. I have seen a picture of a map done in a disposable foil baking pan.

The kids made their landforms and labeled them on popsicle sticks. You are supposed to insert toothpicks and make labels out of sticky address labels or paper to stick on them, but I didn't have any toothpicks! The maps take about a week to dry, and then we will paint them with poster paints or tempera paint. I'll add those pictures to this post when we're done.

To do a salt dough map of a specific geographical area (country, continent, etc.), just print out an outline map on card stock and have your child shape the dough using the base map as a guide. You should use an atlas to help locate rivers, oceans, mountains, and other landforms. The student should use the dough to shape these landforms onto the map. Stick toothpicks into the areas of the map to be labeled and add labels to the toothpicks after the map is painted and dried.

Free stuff for this project:

Salt Dough Landforms: This web page has a recipe for the salt dough and explains how to do a similar landform project

Salt Dough Recipe: Here's a different recipe from a fellow homeschooler - I'm going to try this recipe for our next project

Enchanted Learning's Illustrated Glossary: Landforms and Bodies of Water: This is a large list of landforms to teach using this project.

Tapestry of Grace's Gallery: There are lots of pictures of salt dough maps here (scroll down a bit).

Geography Resources: This is the link to free geography resources that I have posted about. You will find some links to outline maps there.

~Andrea

Since I blogged about Knowledge Quest's free geography e-book, I came across a great map site. Most homeschoolers probably already know about it, but it is new to me, so I'm sharing anyway.

I have used Xpeditions at National Geographic before (another great map resource), but for some reason I never saw their MapMachine Student Atlas.

At the Student Atlas Home Page, you can look up a map by region; look up a theme, such as animals, for a major region; or search for a specific city. This will take you to an Interactive Map page. You can also go directly to the Interactive Map page and search from there.

Tapestry of Grace has a great geography track, and we are always looking for good physical maps to help us visualize "the lay of the land." This will be a great help with that when we have trouble finding something on our home atlas.

The Interactive Map is great, but my very, very favorite area of this site is the Printable Wall Maps page. There is a great selection of political, physical and some regional maps in PDF format that you print out and piece together. The final size is 25 x 30 inches. I printed out the map for the Middle East, and it is beautiful! I've always wanted to stock up on wall maps, but the cost has deterred me. I have nice, big wall maps of the World and the United States that are well-used, and these free printable wall maps will round out my collection unless I get some larger maps as gifts.

Since I'm blogging about free map resources, my oldest son wants me to list Google Earth. If you really want to see what a region looks like, download the free version of this program. You can get so close that you see the houses! Not all computers will run this, so be sure to check the minimum configuration before downloading.

Another great site for printable maps is WorldAtlas.com. There you can find lots of maps, outline maps, country information, flags and even clipart.

There are tons of great free map and geography websites out there, but these are my favorites. I hope you enjoy the resources.

~Andrea

Hmmm... my blog seems to be turning into a free resources blog! Here's the latest:

Terri Johnson from Knowledge Quest wrote an e-book called "Globalmania: Master World Geography in 7 Months." I downloaded it when she offered it in her e-newsletter and finally had time to look at it yesterday. Wow! I happen to love geography, and Tapestry of Grace integrates it into our history studies, but Globalmania will be a great supplement to TOG for me. My children do the map work, but I don't test them on it (yet). I am going to use the ideas in Globalmania as a fun way for my kids to really get their geography facts down.

Did I say geography and fun in the same sentence?? Yes! Terri Johnson has written out a systematic world geography course that is mostly based on free online games. You can use this e-book as a 7-month geography course, or you can use it to supplement what you are already doing. There are also 16 beautiful maps at the end of the e-book - one labeled and one unlabeled map for the world and 7 main geographic regions. Well, I guess you can describe them as "beautiful" if you are weird and like maps - otherwise you might say they are useful learning tools. How's that for non-map lovers?

Go here or here to read Terri Johnson's article entitled "Must I Teach Geography?" The download link for her free e-book is available there.

Enjoy!

~Andrea

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