South America Activities and Resources

We're finally done with our South America unit! We spent about four weeks on it, and that felt like a good amount of time for our usual casual pace. I allotted two weeks per continent for the rest of the summer, so I'm hoping that now that we have some momentum going, two weeks will be sufficient. We started Africa this week, so we'll find out if two weeks is indeed enough time.

But back to South America! Here is a list of most of the stuff we did over the course of the study.

Movies set in South America
(Other than the Planet Earth episode, all the other movies are strictly for fun and getting a feel for South American climate and culture-- not any serious education!)

Rio

The Emperor's New Groove
Up (Pixar)
BBC's Planet Earth: Jungle Episode (Allen's favorite part, go figure, was the howler monkeys)


Books


Red-Eyed Tree Frog

The kids loved this book sooooo much. It's full of real-life pictures, simple sentences (perfect for the Pre-K crowd!) and full of drama. The kids have been pretending to eat moths and run away from boa snakes all week.

Our small-town country library is very limited on South American resources, so we didn't do a whole lot of reading in this unit. The tree frog book sparked an interest in amphibians and reptiles, however, so we did read a bunch of books about snakes, the life cycle of frogs, and different lizards from around the world. We loved the Nic Bishop books!

South America Trays

Hole punching/pasting

We punched dots out of the construction paper and then glued them on the frogs to make poison dart frogs!

South America puzzle

In lieu of purchasing a real wooden puzzle, I printed out a map of South America, colored in the countries according to the Montessori puzzle map, laminated the sheet, cut apart all the countries, and provided a control map.

Water transfer

I used food coloring to make the water green, since the Amazon is such a lush, green place (kind of a half-baked idea, I know). Next time, I think I would try to make it pink, since that is the Montessori South America color (as opposed to green, which is Africa)

Child-size Christ the Redeemer statue

I had Oscar lay down on a giant piece of butcher paper with arms outstretched like the statue and traced his outline. Decorate, cut out, and mount over our big mirror.

Pin Map

See the blog post here.

Animal Matching/Classification

I did something that I almost never do-- purchasing a material that didn't have an exact purpose already planned out. In this instance, the item was a Safari Rainforest TOOB, which I got for a few reasons: 1) I thought it would be a great supplemental material, 2) I see TOOBs pop up everywhere on educational blogs and wanted to see if the hype was warranted, and 3) because I still had $10 to go to qualify for free shopping on Amazon, haha.

I am frequently amazed by how organically any given subject matter comes up around here. Almost any area of study that I stress about comes up in my conversations with Oscar without me even trying to broach it. In this case, animal classification! Oscar and I were discussing the other day about how all chickens are birds, but not all birds are chickens, and BOOM! The doorway is open for learning about classification.

For the first few days, we simply worked on identifying and matching the animals to their pictures. I used some tiles from Continent Animals Bingo and made the rest. Oscar and Allen both loved this activity!

After Oscar was naming the animals with ease, we talked about animal classification and made cards together for the extension.

I would definitely say that the TOOB was worth the money!

Paper Snakes

I didn't get a picture of this, but there are plenty to see at Mess for Less, where I got the idea! The kids had lots of fun stringing them up.

Amazon Sensory Bin

I took inspiration from Living Montessori Now's frog life cycle bin and made an Amazon River bin. Water beads in a smaller container for the river, plastic Easter grass, twigs, stones, and leaves scavenged from an artificial plant. I taped a few leaves along the top to make a jungle canopy of sorts. And of course, there are a brightly colored frog and lizard! The TOOB animals also eventually joined the menagerie-- Oscar had the best time reenacting a Youtube video we watched of a jaguar sneaking up on a caiman in the water. I would have liked to add some green water beads to make the river more Amazon-like, but blue was all I had. Oh well!

Making Pao de Quiero

With Oscar as an assistant, I tried my hand at making a Brazilian cheese puff recipe. Nobody really liked them. However, Oscar got some experience at weighing ingredients on a scale, so it wasn't a total waste of time.

This was probably the first unit study I've ever put together in earnest, and we had a blast! I'm excited to keep on moving forward with more world geography!