We’ve been so busy lately with reading and math and science and more!  DJ has joined a couple homeschool co-op classes including fun science, robotics and hands-on math. At home we’ve now finished 7 chapters of Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding. The latest chapter was on Reading and Drawing Maps. 

We started by printing the map of our region and taping it to the inside of our front door. It is huge but it includes areas we visit frequently. We live in the north and DJ’s dad works at the bottom left. Just a little above dad’s office is my office, DJ’s grandparents’ house and the new co-op we’re visiting once a week. At the very top right of the map you can see I added on an extra panel because that is where DJ’s piano lessons and swim&gym classes are. In the middle right of the map is the location of the science classes DJ has been attending. I almost added the house for DJ’s Grandma Dianne, but that would mean including another city north of us! We’re all over the place!

I had planned to also print another map that was zoomed in enough to see our street and immediate neighborhood but somehow Google has messed up and has our street name wrong in their system!  I keep reporting the error but no fix yet. DJ doesn’t know his address yet so I didn’t want to confuse him by giving him a map with the wrong label!

DJ and I have begun talking walks around our neighborhood. I downloaded an app called RunKeeper that tracks our steps as we go. DJ *loves* to go back to the map it makes after our walk and talk through the journey over and over. 

As usual, the BFSU chapter recommended several books for reading that I found in the library. Latitude and longitude were a new concept for DJ as well as Map Keys and Compass Roses and these books were at the perfect level to engage him. I love our library. If they have a book I’m looking for in any of their branches, I just need to use their website to place a hold on it and wherever it is, they’ll send it to my local branch within a few days. It is SO convenient!

Here he is tracing the latitude line that we live to see what other areas of the world might have similar weather and day length/season patterns. We acquired this globe free from our local Facebook Buy Nothing group. ❤️ 🌏 

The real winner of this set was Mapping Penny’s World. Penny is the dog on the cover and the book is written from the perspective of a child drawing maps of the their bedroom, the yard where Penny buried things, the walk to the dog park and their neighborhood. It really caught DJ’s imagination and he wanted to draw his whole world too!

This is DJ’s drawing of his living room. The drawing is entirely his and he made the compass rose, I just wrote the rest of the words. When he finished he said, “Now you can take a picture of it and put it on the internet for everyone to see. Even people we don’t know!”  Haha. So here it is.