Travel Around the World

We’re going on a pretend trip this month at Sponge, and having loads of fun learning language around travel.   We’re learning language for what to pack and how we get there. Marnie has some great suggestions on other ways to extend the ‘travel plans’ at home.

Exposing children to world culture doesn’t have to mean getting on a plane and visiting other countries. Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could transport ourselves so easily? That travel will come over a lifetime. So, in the meantime, here are a few ways we’ve found to Travel Around the World from our home. Enjoy!

Safari Around the World Toob is beautiful (see above image). The detail is extraordinary and is sure to capture a child’s eye. We use these replicas with Rand McNally’s set of world landmark cards and our eeBoo world map. I set the cards out in a basket with the world monuments and my son natural finds the matching card. Then we seek the monument on the world map. It’s hands on and requires moving around the room, all great for a young child’s development.

Again, using Safari’s figures we match up animals to their home habitat around the world.  Montessori Print Shop has the perfect “Animals of the Continents” download for this activity. You can use figurines and cards, or both, to make this trip around the world happen.

We used two wonderful items for this activity. One is a fantastic set of already laminated cards I purchased for $10 from EBay. This shop has many great “world culture” education sets. I highly recommend them!

We also used our I Never Forget A Face Memory Game
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We’re just getting start with this activity. So far, for my 3 year old, simply listening to the different languages from around the world is perfect. At some point I hope to transition this activity into a Listening Activity that requires a blindfold or simply using your ears to do the work. The website we used to hear several language sound bites in one spot is called Audio-Lingua. There are sound bites from native speakers. For us, it was fun to listen to the languages and then take a look at the map to see the countries in which the people speak the particular language. I can see this activity becoming a very good listening activity later on.

I hope you found some inspiration in these ideas.

Thank you for choosing to read this post.
Marnie