Italy

The kids (and I) are taking part in a Tour of Countries with the local Catholic homeschool group.  We had our first tour today.  This month's country was Italy.  I picked the economy, money, and physical geography of Italy for the kids to learn about.  We made these displays for the tour and (unknown to us until today) gave a quick talk on them.  The poor boys were quite worried because I told them they wouldn't have to do any talking.  I guess I was wrong (for the first time ever - ha ha).

 Cormac and Rex helped me with this display.  While they couldn't remember any of the information, they did help pick paper colors and write in the money amounts for me.  The books, egg, and rosary were from Italy so we had them on display.

 Stephen did a display on the euro, which is the official money of Italy.  We are quite versed on euro and its design now.  The money beside the computer is what Darren brought back with him from his Italy trips.  We used the computer because we found a neat interactive program about the coins.  We also gave some play money to each child who wanted some.  We gave out a copy of each coin and the bank notes from 10 to 500.  I am glad to say I won't be cutting anymore out.  Those little coins were a pain to trim.

 Blase's display was by far the best one in our family.  He did a great job.  The first thing we did was get this wonderful cardboard chunk from Sam's Club for free.  Then we bought a physical map of Italy and decided to make it a raised relief type map.  We used packing peanuts glue together then glued to the cardboard to give Italy its mountain ranges.  It turned out better than I had expected.  Blase did the positioning and I did the map gluing.  It was a joint effort!  We then put toothpicks in with sticky note flags on the ends of them.  Blase decided what parts of Italy he wanted to point out on the map.  For instance - #1 flag was Mont Blanc the tallest mountain half in Italy and half in France.  He labelled the three largest cities, the three volcanoes, the two independent states within Italy (Vatican City and San Marino), the Po River, Venice, and the tallest mountain completely in Italy.  I printed off a collection of maps he could choose from.  He picked the precipitation amounts (we also did climate), the size of Italy compared to the USA, and the physical regions of Italy.  He did really, really good answering the questions I asked him in front of everyone.

This is a a somewhat close up of his map.

Next month we are studying Hungary.  I picked the same three topics so we could just continue focusing on the same type of information.  Look for pictures of Hungary next month!!