Expedition Earth: China

The boys and I have been doing Erica's (@ Confessions of a Homeschooler) Expedition Earth curriculum. The curriculum is only $15, but you will need quite a few geography resources to go along with it. It's still a great deal and a great curriculum!

Each of the boys got their own passport for the journey around the world:

Our first country is China:

We'll be reading The Story About Ping tomorrow to go along with our China study (we also read it as part of our Five in a Row curriculum):

Today we made Chinese lanterns:

And you know with 2 boys around they wouldn't stay upright for long:

Since they are only 5 and 3, we're just learning some basic facts about China (we didn't get into the fact that people can speak Mandarin and Cantonese):

We'll be finishing China this week and moving on...probably to Thailand since we'll be visiting there in real life in a few weeks. Fun, fun!

For My Nana - A Map

My grandmother has been concerned that the tsunami in Samoa would affect us. I just want to reassure her (and everyone else) that we are nowhere near there. Singapore is as close to Samoa as Houston is to the western coast of Africa. (Now, we are close to Indonesia where the earthquakes have been hitting the last couple of days and parts of Singapore have felt the tremors, but our little family has not. One of the benefits of living on the 4th floor as opposed to the 24th floor...you don't feel buildings swaying as much!) :-)

You can find Singapore on the following map on the middle-left side, just south of Kuala Lumpur, right above the equator. I could not even get Singapore and Samoa on the same map where you could read any of the country names. Samoa is south and very far east of Singapore...east of Australia and Papua New Guinea. (click the map to enlarge.)

In case you weren't sure where Singapore was located, here is my very inadequate geography lesson. :-)