Expedition Earth: Our Final Review

It's our final geography review for the year - it really is!!

Back in the very beginning we made paper mache earths.  This is what ours turned out like . . . opps!  The picture below is what it was supposed to look like.  Our friends brought theirs along and kindly made it into a pinata!  Of course someone needs to run off with "the world of loot"!  He is soo his father's son.

Then the kids enjoyed their last game of Jeapordy - I was pleasantly surprised with what they all remembered! Whew, I'm going to pat myself on the back a tiny bit and breath a sigh of relief.
















Then we ate lunch and for dessert we had these fantastic world cupcakes that our friends brought.  Seriously KS, they turned out so cute!  Can you believe they left the cake for us too? YUM!

Expedition Earth: Animal Study

With each new country we studied six new animals and then posted them on our animal classification door.  The mammal kingdom outnumbered the rest by a land-slide.

Expedition Earth: Australia

Here we come Australia! Thank you Confessions of a Homeschooler's Expedition Earth for a great journey!

Agent H especially requested that we save Australia for last because it's his faaaavorite!  So I was happy to oblige.  

Here are our highlights:

We made two types of boomerangs - the origami version actually worked!
Studied the Great Barrier Reef
Made sponge paintings of reefs
We sang "It's designed to do . . ." over and over and over.
Watched a light show and tour of the Sydney Opera House
Studied Ayers Rock
Learned about their super cool plastic money
Practiced our "Aussie" talk

Links to all the above are on my Pinterest board for Australia.

Expedition Earth: New Zealand

Here we come New Zealand! Thank you Confessions of a Homeschooler's Expedition Earth for a great journey!

The Oceania's were lots of fun!  Here are the highlights from New Zealand:

We ate kiwi (hehe!)
Watched on old cartoon that came on each night when New Zealand's television broadcasting would shut down for the night
Learned about their tribal dance and saw their soccor team perform the dance.
Made whizzer crafts
Read fun facts
Studied the animals
Looked at the dreamy landscape and talked about hobbits

Here is a link to my Pinterest board for New Zealand.

Expedition Earth: Egypt

Here we come Egypt! Thank you Confessions of a Homeschooler's Expedition Earth for a great journey!

This was our last stop in Africa.  Only one continent to go after Africa folks - I've got to say I'm ready!

As you can see The General was really concentrating on his heiroglyphic rocks!

We made a nice little village of oragami pyramids too!

Since cats are a very important part of Egyptian culture I had to include this photo of Agent H's Mr. Kitty with our creations.

Oh these headdresses were FUN to make!

We also did the apple mummification project.  Eight slices of apples (equal size) burried in specific mixtures to see which one would be best preserved.   

Here is a link to my Pinterst board for Egypt.

Expedition Earth: Nigeria

Here we come Nigeria! Thank you Confessions of a Homeschooler's Expedition Earth for a great journey!


All I can say is be sure that your kids are ready for some quicksand talk.  This topic turned out to be a bit too scary for my six year old.  Poor guy had dreams our whole house was submerged in quicksand for a couple of weeks.  Of course it all originated from this YouTube video (I fast forwarded part of it for modesty's sake).


We made homemade quicksand - The General played with the left-overs for an hour plus! We scrapped a fork across the top, submerged army guys, and just got messy.

We also prayed, read stories, and played mancala.   Here is an online link to coolmathgames.com's mancala. 


Here is a link to my Pinterest board for Nigeria.

Expedition Earth: Morocco

Here we come Morocco! Thank you Confessions of a Homeschooler's Expedition Earth for a great journey!


We had some fun videos to watch with this country:
The harvesting of saffron
Cactus farming
AND the Moroccan Mall (the largest mall in Africa). Being from Minnesota home of the Mall of America we HAD to see that one. 


The boys had fun swishing around the Ilukeres fly whisks we made.

Here is a link to my Pinterest board for Morocco.

Expedition Earth: Kenya

Here we come Kenya! Thank you Confessions of a Homeschooler's Expedition Earth for a great journey!


I have a friend who years ago suggested I try making toasted wheat berries for a snack.  I never could remember just how to make them until I found the recipe in our The kids' Multicultural Cookbook.  Agent H and I munched on them all day.  This time we used hard wheat berries.  Next time I hope to make them with soft wheat berries in hopes that they won't be quite so hard to chew!  We did find out that they have strong gums and teeth as a result of chewing on these.  No wonder!  (I have to mention that this was actually an Ethiopian snack that we snuck in during our Kenya week.)


We made fabric baskets, read a book about Mama Miti, watched a YouTube about climbing Mount Kilimanjaro (okay yes this is actually located in Tanzania).

Here is the link to my Pinterest board for Kenya.

Expedition Earth: South Africa

Here we come South Africa! Thank you Confessions of a Homeschooler's Expedition Earth for a great journey!


We started out the contintent of Africa with our first salt dough map.

Some of our highlights from Africa are:

Tugela Falls

Western Deep, the deepest mine in the world

The Cullian I, the World's largest diamond

Studying Africa's five biggest animals: rhino, lions, leopards, elephant, buffalo

and of course . . . the African penguins!

Here is a link to my Pinterest board for South Africa.

South America Review

It was review day for South America and that means . . . Jeopordy!  My dear friend KS did a wonderful job of putting these games together for each of our reviews.

This was our Argentenian treat.  It was called Three Kings cupcakes.  Inside the cupcakes was baked a treasure (animal cracker - not a good choice since it got soft and was not very noticable), they were sprinkled with powdered sugar, then topped with an egg shell that was filled with vanilla extract and lemon juice.  The idea was that it could catch fire and burn a little show for us.  Well that would have happened if I had read the instructions better and seen that it actually called for something rather than vanilla extract - what it was escapes me.  


Remember the continent burn-out I mentioned in the last post?  Let's just blame it on that again.

Expedition Earth: Argentina

Here we come Argentina! Thank you Confessions of a Homeschooler's Expedition Earth for a great journey!
We read from Children Like Me, our Usborne Encyclopedia of World Geography, and Geography from A-Z.  We Listened to Wee Sing Around The World on Spotify, and we studied the Ihuazu' Falls.  


We also said good-bye to South America this week.  I have to admit I think I was going through a bit  of burn-out through this tropical continent.  It probably shows in the lack of photos and the fact that I seem to have not even created a Pinterest board for this country.  Ah well.  


Here's a picture to brighten things up a bit. It's another of the card table jungle fort.  I think it was up for the entire continent study.  You can see The General's toes peeping out on the right and of course Shorcake is   half-in half-out.  They stuffed that fort with everything soft that you can imagine and then squished themselves in there and would sit quietly or just giggle for the longest time.  So sweet!

Expedition Earth: Peru

Here we come Peru! Thank you Confessions of a Homeschooler's Expedition Earth for a great journey!

 I'm sorry Peru but you're going to be remembered for the amazing stuffed avacado recipe I made this week in honor of your native produce. Dear Erica from CofH, thank you for including this recipe in the curriculum.



 










We studied Machu Picchu, the highest dune in the world: Cerro Blanco, and discussed the Amazon River.

Here is a link to my Pinterest board for Peru.

Expedition Earth: Panama

Here we come Panama! Thank you Confessions of a Homeschooler's Expedition Earth for a great journey!

I never thought I'd be pulling out Animaniacs for school but I couldn't resist this great little clip on You Tube. It does a a nice job of giving a mini Panama lesson.

 Once again I seemed to have missed taking photos this week. So here are more pictures of Shortcake about her business. This time she is disassembling Agent H's assignment folder.

 Here is the link to my Pinterest board for Panama.


 

Expedition Earth: Venezuela

Here we come Venezuela! Thank you Confessions of a Homeschooler's Expedition Earth for a great journey!

We took a walk around the house to look for pottery, studied Angel Falls, Simon Boliviar, and Venezuelian animals.

 Apparently I have no photos of our week (I think we may have been in the middle of our co-op project fair or Valentine's day or something) so I give you these photos of Shortcake. She and The General spent hours going in and out playing with this card table jungle fort.

Here is my Pinterest board for Venezuala.

Expedition Earth: Arctic

Here we come Arctic! Thank you Confessions of a Homeschooler's Expedition Earth for a great journey!

We studied snowy owls. Owl Babies is the cutest little movie ever! Watch it here on You Tube. We stitched our own owl babies - oh they turned out cute! I got our free pattern at Juicy Bits.

We checked out our first online library book: Actic Fox

Studied our fun facts from the curriculum.

Tried our hands at soap whittling. It took some probing but once they started, they got the feel for it. I think we ended up with some sort of a fish and a polar bear.

Here is my Pinterest board for the Actic. I wish we could have made time for the Polar Bear art project posted there!

Expedition Earth: Antarctica

Here we come Antarctica! Thank you Confessions of a Homeschooler's Expedition Earth for a great journey!

We took a little liberty and did the Poles in the middle of the year rather than the regularly scheduled end of the year. I had thought that it would be fun to study the snowy places while we had snow. Little did I know that this would be such a "brown" Minnesota winter. So we made what we could of the little snow we had.

First up are the igloos we made:

Agent E says his was an igloo church.

Agent H's igloo.

The General's igloo in process . . again, and again, and again. Did I mention we were working with sugar cubes? He may have actually eaten more than he built with.

We read a lot about Shackelton. We watched a clip on YouTube about his story. I found this amazing study on him with great printables and we did a few pieces of it to add to our file folder on the Poles.

We read Mr. Popper's Penguins again - dah! (I'm such an 80's child)

We made snow cones with our Snoopy Snow Cone maker!!

Here is our lovely penguin foot painting art (which turned into a wrestle hug):

There are lots of other neat links over on my Pinterest board for Antarctica if you want to check them out.

Expedition Earth: Brazil

Here we come Brazil! Thank you Confessions of a Homeschooler's Expedition Earth for a great journey!

I'm kind of jumping out of order here since I still haven't posted about our study of the Poles but the boys had so much fun working on their rainforest diorama I wanted to post this quick.

I have some foggy sense of what South America is all about - I think jungle and hot and then I kind of get stuck. I think that's going to change thanks to E.E. So what did we study this week?

Christ the Redeemer (amazing!)

Brazillian animals (like the armadillo - CUTE! Red eyed tree frog - que the "Go Diego Go" music.)

Drinking straw flutes (ours flopped, I guess you need the right kind of straw).

Brigaderiros - cooling in the fridge, almost ready to be rolled in coconut or sprinkes. Agent E was my stirring helper.











Native face painting
































The rainforest - here's our diorama of the levels of the forest



















The Emergent













The Canopy













The Understory













The Forest Floor (Just ignore the fact that the natives are American natives, Agent H really wanted to add them in. :) )













And a heart that hurts for people of Brazil. So much pain. I didn't show the boys the video because of the sensative topics included but Operation World really opened my eyes to the need for prayer. Check my Pinterest board (below) if you want the link to Operation World.

Here is the link to my Pinterst board for Brazil.