Category: Social Studies

Oh no! In the book Gingerbread Man Lost in the School, the kids have to find where their gingerbread man disappeared too! There is a floor plan of the school and Mom and I like to look at it and figure out where he was and each page of the book.

So, Mom decided to make our own floor plan of our basement and search for him in our home! First we made our own gingerbread man.

Then we outlined our basement on paper. Mom would point to where she hid him, and I had to figure out where that was. Doing so helped me gain a little bit of understanding about maps (or floorplans, at least) and we had fun playing Hide-and-Seek with our Gingerbread Man!

We explored where our food comes from (and learned about the geography of the world) by making a map on our driveway. As we read How to Bake an Apple Pie and See the World, we acted it out as we traveled to the different places that the narrator told us to travel to.

Paul was our main cartographer.

We pretended we were harvesting the wheat in Italy…

and finding the bark for the cinnamon when we got to Sri Lanka, for example.

Our map ended up in a big circle around our driveway, since we ended up where we started, of course!

Then we found the ingredients in our home, but I gave the kids a twist: we had to make our own butter! Caroline and Paul were happy helping out in the butter churning. And they found the end result to be absolutely delicious.

Even Mary found this a “delicious” outside activity.

It was such a lovely day, it turned out just nice to relax outside too.

Our continents preschool lesson this week was quite simple and brief, but I had remembered my place on the map (and the globe) since then!

First we read Me on the Map by Joan Sweeney. It’s is the general go-to book for such an introduction to our place in the world, mapping in general, and the fact that there are continents. It shows so clearly in steps that we have a place in a house, in a street, in a city, in a state, etc. I was not surprised that Strawberry enjoyed reading it with me. After we read it together, it was time to figure out our place “on the map.”

We began by finding her room. Then we walked down to the corner to find out our street name. Then we talked about our community as we headed home.

We got out the globe and the magnifying glass (a tool that will make any project more fun). Spinning the globe always is fun, so once we got that out of our system, we flipped through a few library books about mapping and continents.

I was delighted to learn about Antarctica (that is where the penguins live) and to hear that my big brother Raisin was born on the continent of Australia. We found the continents as the book mentioned them.


And of course we had to find where we are!

I learned about Native American Homes in preparation for Thanksgiving, and learning about the first Thanksgiving!


I had a Thanksgiving Party at preschool.