I have a couple of main resources I’m using to plan my path through the kids’ Imaginary Island study. First and foremost, I’m using Modern Montessori Guide’s Imaginary Island Bundle. The bundle contains a sequence of lesson introductions, and a sequence of research/work for the kids. I’m also using an outline from a Montessorian named Alyx Hodges who posted her outline on a Facebook group during the pandemic. If you google her and Imaginary Island, you may be able to find it.
Leaving behind land and water forms, we’re moving on to looking at latitude and longitude. Both resources mentioned above state that the kids can start their island design, but since we’re doing this as a co-op, and I don’t know exactly what background all the other children have, I thought that we actually needed to think a little but about island placement and island formation first. If they want an island with lots of sandy beaches, they probably won’t want to place their island up by the Arctic!
So – we’re going to spend a couple of weeks on latitude and longitude, then look at island formation.
Latitude and longitude was a review for most of the kids. I used some 3 part cards to help us identify the lines that divide up the Earth into different hemispheres which also let us review the cardinal directions.
I had globe printouts from a lesson by GPS.gov – click the link that says “punching out the globe”. To these we added latitude and longitude coordinates, continuing to discuss Norther, Southern, Eastern, and Western hemispheres. Then the kids began coloring the globes. We ran out of time to complete these together, so we they finished them off at home.