Preschool Geometry and with Globes

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Baby Bear is learning about planets in school.  She askes me a lot of questions about things in the solar system now.  "What planet is Massachusetts on?"  she asked this morning.  I wanted to teach her more about the planet that we live on, so I took out the globe that my parents got for me when I was younger.  

Inflatable Globe 

Everyone that wants to raise confident and educationally curious needs to get a globe.  You can find an inflatable globe for as little as $6.99 on Amazon or get a nicer one that you can leave on the shelf.  

Start with discovering what exactly a globe is.  Dora the Explorer has a Map.  Her map is flat

The first thing to do is familiarize yourself and your child with the globe.  {I say yourself because you will learn a lot about how your child thinks with all of the questions that they ask!}

Things to find:

Places-Locations of friends, family

Continents

Oceans

Next you need some string so that you can measure different places.   We are taking a trip courtesy of Allegiant Air next week from Toledo, OH to Clearwater, FL.  So we used that as a starting place to measure. 

With the globe, you might find that the shortest place between 2 places is not a straight line.  This is an important phenomenon in elliptical geometry.  At this age, you do not have to give your children answers as to why, just show that that it is different than flat geometry. I do have a really fun riddle to work on that my Math Professor, Dr. Wyneken, gave our class:

 A bear left his house, travelled 1 mile south, turned Left, walked 1 mile. Turned right, walked another mile and was back at home. What color was the bear? 

You can use your string and your globe to find the answer.  If you know what color the bear is, post it in the comments!