An individual presentatioin?

So I finally got tired of waiting for our world map to arrive in the mail. Though I only mentioned it yesterday I do have more than 24 hours of patience, I promise. This material has been on order since early August...I think I've been quite patient.

Anyways today I dug up in the attic of the school to drag out an old one. A large chunk of central america is missing and there are only 3 knobs on the entire puzzle but I decided it was better than nothing. W takes out the globes in our classroom almost daily and I have really been waiting to introduce him to more aspects of geography. I've talked about the puzzle maps before in this post: Montessori Sunday: Puzzle Maps, but today was the first time I've actually presented it to a child using all the steps.

My favorite part is using clay to demonstrate how a round sphere (like the globe) can be cut in half and then flattened to make the two flat circles of the map. I started the presentation with S and as soon as she started bringing materials to the mat the other two little girls in the class had also wandered over to watch. By the time we had discovered that the colored continents were the same on both the globe and map the boys had all joined us.

So I presented how a globe can be turned in to a mat to the entire class. Now in my album this presentation is written up for an individual, and I did insure that S was the one who actually got to do the squishing down of the clay, but who am I to tell a group of quiet and attentive 3 & 4 year olds to go away. I just figure I saved myself having to repeat the exercise 4 more times!

The puzzle itself was no problem for S, and I hadn't thought it would be but it's a doorway to other things for her later down the road. What I hoped would happen is that the other children would be eager to try the giant map out for themselves, seeing how fun and easy it was for S. We'll find out tomorrow when there's more time. I'm quite curious to see how W especially does with it....he's still in a bit of a wandering mood and needs some work to engage with. Hopefully geography is it.