My son loves maps, especially the ease of browsing places and seeing what they look like on Google Maps. Since, in his geology class, he has been learning about mountains and volcanoes on the earth’s surface, we played a matching game using some of the landforms he has come across. I gave him the names of some of the global landforms he has encountered in his studies and asked him to figure out which continent they are on!
We began with some mountains ranges, but i added in a few volcanoes, rivers, and deserts that he has heard in his history book and/or his geology classes. There were a few that he did not know at all, which surprised me. Others, he could figure out from the context.
For example, he was excited to see “Atlas Mountains” since he’s been reading about Greek mythology (and enjoying Rick Riordan’s series about the Greek gods).
“That must be west!” he said. “In the book they went to San Franscisco to find where Atlas held up the world.”
“Good idea, thinking west,” I said. “But when the maps were labeled and the myth about Atlas was believed, where would west have been?”
He returned to our world map and thought a moment.
“It must be in Morocco!” he said, just before he found the label on the map for the mountains.
He also gained some new experience referencing an atlas to find his answers. He looked in the index to find what he was looking for and, by looking at the corresponding map, he could find what continent the landform was on. Raisin wanted to go straight to Google Earth to find his answers, but I insisted our first step would be on the big map on the floor.
I made some recording sheets for him. After he figures out which continent each landform is on, then he can go on Google Earth and find an image to go along with the landform. We’ll print those out and glue them to his chart.
We only got through the first half (the easy half!) of the list, but he enjoyed the activity so far. He can’t wait to find them on Google Maps or Google Earth!
See more learning ideas about the continents below!
Toss the Globe Geography Game from Still Playing School
Hands-On Plate Tectonics from Schooling a Monkey
Continent Boxes from Parenting Chaos
Story of Olympic Rings with Free Printable from Planet Smarty Pants
Assigning Global Landforms to Continents from Line Upon Line Learning
Continents Books for Kids from 123 Homeschool 4 Me