Mapping Picture Books

We tied our "March in like a lion" morning, back into our study of Africa, by reading Mary Pope Osborne's Magic Tree House Lions at Lunchtime - at our own lunchtime, yesterday. It is set in Kenya, the same as Mama Panya's Pancakes, but focuses in more on the wildlife, than the people of Africa.


We also read The Sabbath Lion: A Jewish Folktale from Algeria by Howard Schwartz, which as the title suggests, is set in Algeria. I'm not usually a huge fan of legends and folktales, but this particular one is extremely well written, and has a captivating fairytale like quality, which makes it enjoyable to read, and mesmerizing to listen to. The children really enjoyed it.


After lunch, we added thumbnail printouts of the book covers to our map of Africa, onto the countries in which they are set.


A library search this week, turned up so many good picture books from all across Africa, that I decided we needed a map to keep track of which countries we were reading about. Owl & Mouse, has free printable maps in a variety of sizes, from single page to 7x7 page versions. We opted for a 4x4 page map of Africa.


It's large enough to fit thumbnail printouts of our book covers into most of the countries...


...but still small enough to fit on the wall near our table, where we will see it often.



It's an older map, so there are a few countries missing, but we'll add the necessary borders, as we go, along with the names of each country we add a book title to. Just three books into our reading, we're already loving this type of geography and literature connection, I think we'll be using more maps as backdrops for our reading, whenever possible, in the future.

It's great to be a homeschooler.

Linked with What My Child is Reading at Mouse Grows Mouse Learns.