Teaching Geography Using Circular Cutouts

Hi. This is one lesson I use to teach geography to my kindergarten students. What I did was, I took six sheets of paper. One, two, three, four, five, six. And, they’re just circles, and they get smaller, and smaller. Or larger and larger whichever way you want to read it. The first one is my house. And, what I’m doing is, I label each circle, so I have my house, my city, my state, my country, my continent, and my planet. And so, then what I do is, I just have one of these and I do a whole group lesson. And, I talk about how this is my house, and see this is really small but, when I look at my city it’s a little bit bigger. And you can draw maybe an outline of what your city looks like. And then I’ll flip it up, and as it gets bigger, my state is bigger than my city, and my country is bigger than my state. We talked about how my continent is bigger than the country I live in. And then, last how the planet is bigger than the continent. So, why I do this is because I want them to, I want to give them a visual, about the size of the place that they live, in a way that they can compare. So, you can ask questions like which one is bigger? Is it, would it be where you live, or the continent you live on? And then, they can talk about no I live, no my house is smaller than the continent. And this also gives you a place where you can label and write down what continent you live on. Where your house is in your neighborhood. On, in your city you can, you know extend this and talk about mapping and directions, and then also in your state. Where in your state do you live? And you live in the north, south, east, or west part of your state. So, it’s a really good reference. Also, you can have kids build their own. And then they can use it to have conversations with each other about their home, city, state, country, continent, planet. And that’s one way that I teach geography to my kindergartners.