Having been raised on three continents, it’s important to me that my children know as much about their world as possible. I thought this felt board activity could be a fun introduction to continents. Inspired by a high school history teacher who forced all of his students to learn to draw simplified maps of the world and Europe, I created a template based off of this map from http://www.mapsofworld.com/. I cut the simplified continents out of felt and made a new blue-background travel felt board. I also laminated (very poorly, I’m afraid) a print-out of the same map. I will keep the laminated map and the felt pieces in a folder, within a larger folder that holds all of Emma’s felt board activities. I’m not sure how well Emma understands the concepts of continents (or even the world) at this point, but she enjoys playing with the felt pieces, looking at the map, and talking about where various friends and family members live. Here’s the template I created, if you would like to try this activity yourself:
Emma asked to trace the map of the world. She did a great job, in spite of using thick printer paper. Anyone know where to buy tracing paper?
She even added some animals to the world (after I took the above picture) – here’s her version of a baby fox:
and a sheep:
