Free Friday: MapMaker from National Geographic

We had a sick day today as Gess is struggling with a sinus infection and bad cough.  The meds have finally started to work and so she woke up feeling better than she has in a few days.  Since it is Friday I decided to do no school and just let her rest.  So, what does a homeschool kid do when there is no school?  Study maps of course!


Well that reminded me about this cool FREE tool I found awhile back.  I have been meaning to mention it on some Free Friday, so here you are!  It's the National Geographic MapMaker.  They have printable 1 page Maps as well as a colorful Interactive MapMaker where you can add your own data, tools, and themes to make your own maps.

We were just studying about salmon so Gess wanted to learn about Alaska. Now she can add her own icons on the map.  Here she has fishing boats and of course fish to represent the salmon in the region we learned about.


If you need some maps for class or have an aspiring map-o-olgist like my Gess (yes, she made up that word), check out the National Geographic Interactive MapMaker.  Its FREE!



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Printable Family Chore Chart

Image
You know chore charts are not just for children.  As I have been struggling trying to keep the house work up among all my summer activities, homeschooling projects, exercise, blogging, church activities and other every day life events I realized that I needed a hand.  Since Gess is getting older and taking on more responsibility I though it was a good time to put some order into her routine of helping.  Then Chelsie gave me a great idea that she uses.  By breaking up my weekly chores into daily tasks I don't have to give up an entire day to nothing but cleaning house! Taking her idea and breaking up the daily chores I came up with the following list.  There is one for each of us and an extra one that goes beyond the standard chores.  It's the stuff we do at least once a week to keep our house neat and clean.  What I love about it is that if something happens on that one day I had set aside to clean the house, it doesn't mean that my entire house gets neglected for anothe
Read more

Computer Time: Starfall.com

Image
One thing my daughter loves to do (like most other kids) is spend time on the computer. One of our favorite websites is Starfall.com . It is a free educational sight that not only teaches reading but the kids really seem to enjoy it. It is geared towards preschool to 2nd grade and is a great tool for learning early reading skills. It helps to teach phonics but can also enhance sight vocabulary as well. The ABC's section is for early reading and it lets you explore your letters and their phonetic sounds. There are great songs for each of the short vowel sounds and for each consonant there is a short activity which explores the letters sound and teaches you some words that start with each letter. Once children know their letters (and even before that) there are stories that you can read. If you click on each word it not only says the word for you, but it sounds it out phonetically, teaching you to do the same. There are lots of other fun activities too. I think it is one of the
Read more

Learning the 10 Commandments

Image
As Gess is getting older we thought it was important to stress having some personal devotion time. I think she needs to know that she can pray and study God's Word anytime she chooses. We always begin her day learning something in the Bible together. Then I have her write and meditate on the portion of Scripture that was the focus for the day. Since she was doing some written work each day we thought it would be good to have a place to keep it all together so that could look it over later and remember what she has studied so far. So we made made her a notebook and titled it My Devotional and keep it with her bible. One of our early lessons this year was to memorize the 10 commandments. I recalled that Living Waters had a great resource for helping kids to memorize them so I went to their site and downloaded their 10 Commandments Learning Aids . They use these images to help tie the number to the actual commandment. They have a full presentation but here is the sheet with
Read more