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The Day The Crayons Came Home – Postcard From Italy

The theme of this months Poppins Book Nook is “Countries Around The World”.  The children’s book I choose is one of my favourites: “The Day The Crayons Came Home”.

Easy and Fun Way to Teach Geography To Kids. Geography Lessons For Kids go well with the book The Day The Crayons Came Home.

In the story, a little boy named Duncan get’s a strange stack of postcards in the mail from some of his crayons that he forgot about or lost over the years.  Some of those crayons sent him postcards from various countries around the world.

In the story, a little boy named Duncan get’s a strange stack of postcards in the mail from some of his crayons that he forgot about or lost over the years.  Some of those crayons sent him postcards from various countries around the world.

If you have children, in my opinion, this is a must read children’s book.  It is quite humorous and had both my daughter and I laughing out loud.

The book presents a great opportunity to introduce some fun geography learning ideal for younger learners.

Geography For Younger Learners

I told my daughter we were going to plan an imaginary trip to any country of her choice.  Since money is no object on this journey, we are free to dream big.

On the very back of the book is a postcard photo of the leaning tower of Pisa.  So, after learning that Pisa was in Italy, my daughter decided we were off to Italy.

My goal of this trip was not to bore my daughter with facts that wouldn’t mean a thing to her.  I wanted her to have an idea of what Italy was like while having fun doing so.

Using Pinterest to Homeschool Geography

Since it’s said that a picture is worth a 1000 words, I took our learning journey to Pinterest.  First step was creating a secret board on my Pinterest account, so as not to bombard my followers with all our upcoming Italian pins.  Then, performing various “Italy” searches, I let my daughter pin whatever she decided looked like something she would like to visit.  Well, ok since she’s 5, I did all the pinning, but she told me everything she wanted pinned.  She got quite enthusiastic about the process, and that’s when learning comes easy, when they are very engaged and very interested in what they’re doing.

Using Pinterest to homeschool Geography

We even got sidetracked creating another secret board for Italian Food.  I promised her in the future we’d add learning how to cook some Italian food to our homeschool schedule.  But for now, I had to focus our learning efforts.  Also to my daughter’s protest who quite enjoyed this pinning trip, I wanted to end our geography lesson for the day here.

Our next geography lesson picked up where we left off in our “Italy” Pinterest board.  It was now time to relook at what we had chosen.  We had to decide which places we wanted to visit on our imaginary journey.  My daughter would pick a photo from our Pinterest board of a place she just had to see, we noted the location and did some further picture searches on that location.  After a little bit of learning investigation, we made a final decision whether that location was indeed worthy of our “trip”.  If it was, we added the city to a map of Italy we had printed out.  If you’re looking for printable maps, D-maps seems to have a great variety of free maps.  At last, our imaginary trip was planned.

  Postcard From Italy

For our next Geography lesson, I asked my daughter to look at our map of Italy and pick the place she would like to visit the most.  She chose Venice.  I told her she was going to design a postcard of things she might see in Venice, Italy – a postcard like a crayon would have sent Duncan in the book The Day the Crayons Came Home, if the crayon would have visited Venice.

Of course, in preparation for drawing her picture postcard, we needed to do some further picture searches of Venice, Italy, so she could determine what she wanted in her picture.  My daughter drew her own postcard template (with my instructions of course), but free printable postcard templates are available online for those that like.

More Geography Lesson Ideas for Kids

Here are some more easy and fun ways to teach geography to young kids:

10 Picture Books About Community Helpers | Homeschool Preschool

Wednesday 23rd of March 2016

[…] The Day the Crayons Came Home at Tree Valley Academy […]

Simply Knowledge Homeschool

Sunday 20th of March 2016

Thank you for sharing on Top-Notch Tuesday! This is a great unit and we look forward to using it :)

Rachael

Monday 25th of January 2016

Thank you for creating a fun homeschool plan to connect with reading a book and using the internet. I am literally running to do this with my 4 year-old DD! I agree, if you make learning exciting the kids will join right in and never suspect it to be forced learning time.

Eva /Kid Minds

Monday 25th of January 2016

I'm thinking of starting a Geography co-op, where we will learn about new country each month with books, international recipes, and activities. It will require quite a lot of planning and cooking for moms, but I think we will all enjoy it. This is a great book!