Geography for 3-year-olds

My son's favorite subject right now is definitely Geography. He loves everything about globes, maps, water, land, etc. We have spent countless hours with our two globes and talking about the Earth, exploring outside for dirt, mud, rocks, water sources, and pointing out the continents anywhere we see them.

When we first started homeschooling back in September, I purchased a sandpaper globe. I introduced it to my son and showed him the different land and water areas. He has always been a tactile learner and likes the feeling of fine sandpaper, so this intrigued him right away. He spent a lot of time tracing the land, telling me which part was land and which part was water.

After he had a good handle on the difference between land and water, I introduced him to the idea of air, land, and water. Luckily for us, the lesson landed on a rainy day, so we went outside and collected some rainwater in a small mason jar, as well as a sample of the muddy, grassy earth. We brought those inside and examined them, noting the differences between them. With these mason jars, my son did some sorting activities. The first one was a land, water, air picture sorting with just the various landscapes. This was not easy for him in the beginning.

Following that, he sorted land, water, and air animals onto a mat that I printed and laminated for him. He really loved doing this. My husband explained the simple idea that land animals walked, water animals swam, and air animals flew. We use Toob animals, which can be purchased on Amazon or at your local Michael's store. Following that, my son sorted land, water, air vehicles on to the same mat. We also used the vehicles from Toobs.


Once he had worked on these for a few weeks, I knew he would be ready for the Continent Globe. I introduced this to him using the Continent Song. In the beginning, he would follow along with me while I sang and point the continents. Now, a few months later, he sings the song all the time and knows all of the continents! He even knows them by their shape, even though they are all given separate colors on the Montessori Continent globe.

I also introduced him to the different land and water forms using the book Water Land and some DIY land and water form tablets. You can see the DIY instructions in this post.

Next up I think we will do some continent boxes once I get them together!