Around the World in Eighty Days - Unit Study Day 4

I am pretty certain that we are not going to make this more than a 5 or 6 day unit study, which means that we have some heavy reading ahead of us, since we only read two chapters yesterday, taking us through chapter 14. As Phileas Fogg detoured to save Aouda, we detoured to http://www.snaithprimary.eriding.net/, to learn a little more about the country of India.

Getting back on track, we focused on learning a bit more about Asia as a whole, and played a mapping game at www.kidsgeo.com/geography-games/asia-map-game.php. This led nicely into a mapping project to demonstrate the difficulty of turning a round globe into a flat map.

We started out with a flat map (I know that's backwards to what I just said, but hang in there). After gluing it to a cereal box to make it a little stronger, we drew an orange peal design over the top of the map.

Then we cut out the orange peal.

Using a thumbtack to make holes in the tops of the "petals", and then hold them together, we formed our map into a globe (almost). It was quite clear that we left a good deal of the map behind in the process.

Moving the other way through the project, we blew up a balloon, and drew some pictures on it. We started out with lines representing the equator and the prime meridian, and then added one picture in each of the four sections of hemisphere.

We let the air out of the balloon, cut it open, and attempted to stretch it out into a rectangle. The effect was good, but as you can see from the pictures, we used a washable marker that didn't dry on the surface of the balloon, so things got a little messy.

We marked our story map through Calcutta, and noted Phileas Fogg's arrival in that city on October 25th on our log. Then, we decided instead of filling in our vocabulary sheets, we would begin watching the 1950's movie version of Around the World in 80 Days starring David Niven. Since that is a three hour movie, it pretty much finished off our day. But, with David Niven as our guide, we finished it off with a good deal of British pomp and dignity.

It's great to be a homeschooler.