Explore the Continents - Geography and History

 

If you read my original 2015-2016 Curriculum post you would know that our oldest son flew through Seton's 1st grade History book in about a month and I was looking at something else to use to teach History.  I looked significantly at RC History and really loved it.  I love that it has a literature based approach to learning History that you re-examine each time period on a 4 year rotation.  BUT, it is a very intense program and almost can be used as a core itself, which is way to much for me and my children right now.  So, we may come back to it in later years, but I knew I still had to search for something else.

 

 

We have loved everything that Seton provides, but also have really been loving so many of the resources from Catholic Heritage Curricula as well!  Looking around I finally saw a curriculum that CHC has called Explore the Continents listed in their 2nd grade curriculum (by the way I am learning not to look to much at grade levels).  I decided to take the plunge and get it and I am so thrilled that we did!  It is a fantastic combination of geography, history, religion and great literature! 

 

 

What you do with Explore the Continents is you go through each different continent and learn about different geographical landmarks such as oceans, rivers, mountains, etc.  You then learn about the animals and different habitats in the continent.  You learn about famous landmarks and places in history and then end with learning about famous saints from each area!  Plus, one of the indexes in the book includes fantastic book lists for each continent to explore and learn more!

The Extra Book List for Studying North America

The first thing that I bought after getting the curriculum was a set of bright and vibrate poster maps of each separate continent.  The book suggests drawing on poster board each continent, but this helped take a little work out of the process.  I also got some fun extras for our little guys to help their learning as well like the Teach My Continents and Animals set for Toddlers which includes animal flashcards, a great puzzle and board book! 

 

 

We got to work and started with North America and we are simply loving it!  We learned about lots of the big geographic landmarks and then also famous monuments like Mount Rushmore, the Statue of Liberty, The Golden Gate Bridge and more!  We are so lucky to live in a time and place where we have the world at our finger tips.  When we were learning about Mount Rushmore we were able to get on the History Channel app using our IPad and watch a great video about building Mount Rushmore!  We are also using a few of our new Usborne books including Look Inside Our World and Usborne's Children's Picture Atlas to help us learn and explore!

 

 

Since we have PLENTLY of time we will just slowly move our way through each continent and explore and learn as we go.  We are blessed with one of the world's best zoo's in our town,so we will take lots of zoo trips to explore the animals from different regions throughout the year.  We will also continue to relate our learning here with our Saint of the Day learning, Saint Mail and Catholic Mosaic activities (about where the Saints are from)!  Beyond the fantastic book lists for each continent they also include ideas for making food from each continent and exploring the history of the people!  I know that this curriculum will provide us with a lot of fantastic learning opportunities within the next year or so!