Classroom to Homeroom: Our Country, Our World (Natural Learning Progression)

As you may have seen in a previous blog post, we have been taking part in a U.S. Postcard Swap. We are enjoying it, and the activities are FUN! We have loved discovering all of the amazing places and interesting facts from right here in the United States. We pick a postcard each day, and read what our faraway friends want us to know about their home area. Then we find the state in our 50 States Fandex, read more about it, and then use the map guide on the back of each state card to locate it on our large wall map. TC (our kiddo) marks each state with a sticker and hangs his postcard on the map.

50 States Fandex

Our Wall Map and Postcards

But somehow... we made a connection through our postcard swapping that led to us getting a postcard from PARIS! What a great way to open up conversation about our world, distance, and a myriad of other things! We were so excited to take our learning in a more "worldly" direction. ;)

Our postcard from Paris!

Suddenly the learning took a different direction, and we have fed our curiosity by spending some time reading some amazing stories from around the world in this awesome book...
(Disclaimer: I am a Usborne Books & More Consultant. We just love the books so much that we use them a lot as a part of our curriculum.)

The book includes the traditional tales of ‘Aladdin and his Magical Lamp’ (Persia), ‘Brer Rabbit Down the Well’ (United States), ‘How Zebras Got their Stripes’ (Africa), ‘Why the Sea is Salty’ (Korea) and ‘The Dragon Painter’ (China).

Not only are the stories and illustrations amazing, but in the back of the book there is an overview of the story origins. These are the types of stories that our kiddo wanted repeated- and they are paired with beautiful illustrations. Learning + Love of Reading = 1 Happy Mama.

The conversations from our postcard fun, and all of the stories, led our son to have a natural curiosity about the world, so we took our time exploring his questions and the many aspects of our world in this book...

http://c4933.myubam.com/p/3772/look-inside-our-world

This non-fiction lift-the-flap book features bold illustrations, simple explanations to complex questions and over 80 flaps to lift. An introduction to geology and geography for young children.

The book has over 80 flaps and is divided into sections. This made it easy to go directly to the section that he had questions about. We took our time exploring, as this isn't the type of book that you'll typically find yourself reading in one sitting.

This is a view from inside of the book. Lots of flaps makes for little intimidation for younger readers.

Once we had made it through the entire book I decided to create a worksheet activity to have him go back and review some of the things he learned. You can download it for free at my Teachers Pay Teachers store.

I love watching our plan for learning turn into something much bigger due to a natural curiosity. In this case we have enjoyed learning all about our country, and in turn, our world. I hope some of these activities are inspirational to you too!

I am joining other fantastic bloggers for this Adventure Story Book Club blog series.
We'll be doing a post similar to this one each month. Take a look at our upcoming themes!

October: Fall Fun

November: Pilgrams and Indians