World Continent Puzzle 🗺️ Map・Making the 🌎Earth Flat・Why 2 🇦🇶 Antarcticas?

Montessori World Map puzzle (buy here) is generally introduced after a child is comfortable with Colored 🌈 Continent 🌎Globe (read a presentation here). In a Montessori Geography curriculum, a child first learns that the Earth is a sphere by exploring the Globe. Then, the concepts of land (continent) vs. water (ocean) are introduced first on the globe, and later more abstractly on the world 🗺️ map. A child also learns to associate each continent with a certain color (Montessori "continent color-coding") and learns their names and positioning. But how to transition from a sphere which represents our Earth to a flat world🗺️ map?  

What you would need:

• a Colored Continent Globe (buy here),
• and a 🍊grapefruit or 🍎an apple.

First, you would point to each continent on the globe and then show the corresponding one on the puzzle. However, there are two 🇦🇶Antartica(s) on the puzzle map! This is why we need a 🍊grapefruit.

You would explain to a child: "Earth is a sphere, but to put it in a map-form, we need to divide this sphere into two hemispheres. We will pretend that this grapefruit is our Earth, and we are to cut our Earth in half to place it on the map.

We took a Globe (sphere) ~ our Earth and made it into two hemispheres~ two halves of a grapefruit.

Pretending that these two pieces of a grapefruit are two halves of Antarctica.

As a result of this visual and concrete presentation, Adrian (33 months) learned hemispheres and on which hemisphere each continent belongs. He also learned that in the process of making a map, we pretended to cut our globe into two parts, thus resulting in two sides of Antartica. 

This is a fun way to teach about hemispheres and to have a snack afterward.

Read a similar post here "🌎 Geography 📖Theory Curriculum Lesson 3: 🗺 Mapping (Making the Earth 🎈 Flat)" where we, with a use of a balloon, attempted to do what cartographers do when making a map of our Earth.