Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Preschool Geometry and with Globes

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preschool elliptical geometry

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

flat map versus globe


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
globe

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. 

globe string measurement

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!

5 comments:

  1. I love how you are using the globe to teach her. It is amazing to me that at preschool age kids are learning the concepts of geometry. PS I have no idea what color the bear is. :)

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  2. Very creative use of the globe!

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  3. This is a great way to get kids involved and make learning fun. What a good idea!

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  4. we have been pulling out the map a lot for our kindergarten aged daughter and she loves it. We don't have a globe or we would use that instead.

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  5. That's a great idea! Sadly, a majority of Americans can't find many countries on the globe (some can't even identify the United States). Getting started early is a great great idea!

    jmcharries@cox.net

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