A Continent Study of AFRICA

It’s a month of African studies in the house.  Mavi enjoyed learning about this beautiful continent, its geography, exploring the different places and landmarks, the wildlife and habitats and of course the different culture and practices that makes Africa unique!

Map and Location.  Just like in any of our continent study, we always start with identifying the location of the continent.  Though Mavi is already familiar of the African continent, he still likes using our Montessori Continent Map, which I got from Tower High Learning.  I got it for a reasonable price and excellent in quality! I purchased a few materials from them and will talk about it in a separate post.

Plotting the animals in the continent map.  He loves doing this!

I am so pleased this this purchase of world map puzzle. I got this for 50% off in a local bookshop.  We can work with individual continents or work it entirely. 

Flags.  We love working with pin maps!    This activity is to familiarize Mavi with the different countries in the African continent and their flag symbol.

We love LEGO and we use them in so many ways! Here, I instructed Mavi to create the South African flag using his LEGO.  This is a similar activity with our Asian Study of flags.  After which, he worked on his African flag nomenclature cards.  The picture card of the South African flag is in the wrong position, reason why I have to remind Mavi to be very careful in positioning flags because they might be interpreted in a wrong way.

He likes positioning his other “favourite” flags in the plate.

Landmarks.  Of course, we made our pyramid version using LEGO. This is what Mavi picked because it is easier to replicate.

Animals and their Habitats.  This is by far Mavi’s favourite.  He’s not yet over with his animal toys and still looooves playing with them.

First one, learning about the different animals in Africa.  Mavi reads the fact cards of my Africa animals and loves talking about it while he play pretends.

If you have a preschooler, it is best to have a matching game. Using animal figures (these are Safari Toobs Wild), match the figure to the picture.

Or in case the figures are not available, you can still use the picture card and label (3 part cards)  for a 3 period lesson in African Animals.  Mavi still loves doing this even though he can easily read and finish the entire activity in a minute.

Another favourite activity is matching the animal skin patterns! Wooohooo! Aren’t these cool? Mavi was so enthralled with this! He did a similar activity on this here.  Next time we visit Africa, we’ll paint the patterns!  Your preschoolers will definitely enjoy this!

Again, if you don’t have animal figures, you can match the animal skin pattern with a picture of an animal, similar to the ones shown here.

And I asked Mavi to pick between a zebra and giraffe, he wanted to work on zebra… so here’s learning the parts of a zebra!  This will familiarize children with the different parts of the animal, and how it is similar to other animals that they are familiar with.  Another great thing about this activity for preschoolers, it will enhance their reading skills :) 

And this how we study the habitats of Africa. Using our cards, we recreate the map of Africa with its biomes.  We also identified the animals that live in each habitat. We follow the colour code of our map and cards.

Plants.  We use our Plant Atlas file to learn about the plants that grows in Africa. We worked on the Control Chart as well, differentiating the plant life in each continent.

Language.  Mavi worked on this briefly.  I printed this African proverbs from here and we used Montessori grammar symbols to identify the nouns, verbs and adjectives in the phrases.  This is also a copywork in case you want your kids to practice writing.

Culture and Beliefs.  I’ve been doing research about Africa and made fact cards (significant) for Mavi to read and use. We did some of the activities in the cards, like creating African patterns (designs on textiles), researching about the ethnic tribes of Africa and enjoying the beaded bracelet my friend gave me that resembles African jewelries.

I’m teaching Mavi how to do research.  We do it using the internet as of the moment but I would like to bring him to the library and do it there as well.  We love our tablet and we use it so many ways! He loves how this girl looks.

And he thinks it is cool to have a lip plate!

Natural Resources.  We did this last year but was not able to touch it because the boys got sick.

Art.  I purchase art lessons from Deep Space Sparkle and they were all amazing! This one is the Africa art lesson which comprises learning how to make mud houses, giraffes, African patterns and creating your Maasai Tribe.  See how he applied the patterns on the body of the tribe?

          

Videos.  We watched the entire series Africa (BBC TV series) on Netflix. The series was beautifully created and entertaining! It was breathtaking! To see all those beautiful landscapes, different habitants, the richness of wildlife. Just WOW.  Watching this video made us want to jump right then and there in Africa! (And a friend also shared a video of Gambia. Thank you!

Songs.  We listened to a few songs on YouTube and see how the people used some of the native instruments.

 

Stories.  I borrowed this book from the library and you can purchase them at Book Depository[aff.link] as well, free shipping!  They contain lots of beautiful African tales and stories. Mavi reads them at night before going to bed.

World History. And to complete our unit, we did an Ancient Egypt Study.  These figurines are from the Ancient Egypt Safari Toobs and they are awesome! Perfect for hands on learning!  Read more about it here.

Here’s a summary of the materials we used in this Continent unit:

1. African Flags
2. Africa Animals
3. Africa Landmarks
4. Africa in a Nutshell
5. Animal Habitats
6. Plant Atlas
7. African Art
8. African Proverbs
9. Safari Toobs Ancient Egypt
10. Safari Toobs Wild

And that’s about it!!  I hope you can pick up a lot of ideas that you can do with your kids!  You can also checkout my pinterest board for other African activities.  Don’t forget to visit us as well in our other social media sites for updates! Thank you!

Follow Pinay Homeschooler's board Continent Study: Africa on Pinterest.

This post is part of the 12 Months of Montessori Learning which is hosted by Natural Beach Living and The Natural Homeschool.

Amazing blogs involved in the 12 Months of Montessori Learning

Natural Beach Living ~ The Natural Homeschool ~ Living Montessori Now

The Kavanaugh Report ~ Mama's Happy Hive ~ Study at Home Mama ~ Child Led Life

Every Star Is Different ~ Grace and Green Pastures ~ The Pinay Homeschooler

[Ancient Egypt] How to Make a Papyrus

Oh this one fun 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 (will have a separate post on this).

What you need:

• 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 to make it more realistic LOL
• 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.

Next, let your kid/s dip the strips of parchment paper into the glue mixture and lay it out horizontally. Do this one by one.

We laid it out horizontally first, and then the second batch is in a vertical position.  This will give the papyrus a weaved effect. Though we all know that in reality, papyrus was formed by laying out the strips in horizontal position only (stripes!).

    

Cover the paper with an Aluminium foil and roll a pin to flatten your work. We don’t have a rolling pin at home so we used the cling film roll.  Wipe out the excess mixture.

After which, dry them overnight. The wet strips are still delicate so I suggest NOT to remove them from your parchment cover. You can easily remove them later on when they’re dry.

And tada!! This is our papyrus! Ready for us! Mavi suggests we make more later after school :)

Hope you find this post helpful! Enjoy making your own! And don’t forget to use any kind of paper you want. I saw some using brown paper as well. That’s cool too!

History: Earliest People

Here are the activities for the first chapter of the Story of the World Vol 1 Earliest People.  (Based on the Activity Book Vol 1) [Affiliate link]

Map and Activity Sheets 

I took a photo of Mavi’s interpretation of the nomads living inside a tent and with a campfire.

 

Cave Painting

The book also suggests that you try cave painting (pretend) as a means of communication or recording of events. 

LEGO Project

As much as possible to we love to incorporate LEGO in our work. So here we made Jericho, the first city… just as the book described it.