Geography Made Fun and Easy

We read “How To Make An Apple Pie and See the World” last week, and see the world we did!

Part of the Five in a Row book list, the book is about a girl who wants to bake an apple pie. She goes to the market but finds it closed. So she goes around the world instead to get the best ingredients for her pie. Readers learn along the way what products some countries are known for, like Italy’s semolina wheat, Sri Lanka’s cinnamon, Jamaica’s sugar cane, and England’s cow’s milk.

One of the benefits of tracing the girl’s route on our map is that we got to naturally talk about the four oceans of the world (though apparently there are five now) and four of the seven continents as we “travelled” to each country mentioned in the story: Italy, France, Sri Lanka, England, Jamaica, and Vermont, USA.

From the free Five in a Row Fold N' Learns

What really got Little T’s interest though were the hands-on activities that we did based on the book. Come see!

We milked the cow from England… without a cow.

I was set to just put the whipping cream in the mixer to make butter. Little T, though, remembered reading in her picture dictionary that butter is made by putting cream in a jar and shake-shaking it vigorously for quite some time… so that’s what we did!

We then had our unsalted butter for breakfast.

And of course, we (and I mean my husband and the kids) baked an apple pie for Mother's Day. 

Before that yummy apple pie though, I made some play dough for the kids to play with and make pretend apple pie with.

Everything that we did seems such light work, but I can't imagine learning about countries, continents, and oceans any other way. 

Make magic!

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