Make the world

Make the world

A project both boys are enjoying!
We started off by covering a balloon with kitchen towel dipped in a mix of glue, blue food colouring and water. This would be the world.  We normally dry paper machie on top of the aga as it dries amazingly fast - so not thinking that's where the balloon went.  But NOT a good idea half an hour later a big bang sent us into the kitchen to find the world had blown up!! Blue coloured paper covered the kitchen.  After blowing up another balloon and recovering it in the rescued bits of paper, we had almost saved the world!! It wasn't quite as good as the first attempt but the kids had spent ages on it so I decided we would continue and see what happened.
Day 2 - balloon dry and fairly solid. We set to work drawing in the continents.  I had printed and cut out the correct sized shapes so the boys drew around these, using a globe and world map poster to position them correctly.  The boys used red thread to represent the equator. This helped them to work out positions.  When we thought we had a good representation we started to colour the continents with pen.  We had to finish off with paint as all the green pens manged to run out. 
We had to rescue Africa when the youngest had gone a bit wild with the pens! A bit of blue paint rescued the situation.
Next job was looking at the arctic circle and after a quick look in some books we decided to paint the arctic circle white. We used a bit of white thread to represent this and painted the area white and icy.  The boys have been watching "polar bears on Ice" on the TV so this was their choice of starting place. Next job was to find some pictures of arctic animals.  This was the oldest job, he searched the web and copied the pictures to publisher.  After we had looked at the size of our arctic circle and the number of animals he wanted to fit in, we decided that each animal would have to be pretty tiny.  After printing and cutting out. We glued the animals in place and used some sticky foam letters to spell out arctic.

Foam stickers were found in the sticker drawer and with a very useful animal globe and some of the kids books we found out where our animal stickers homes were.  Youngest had great fun sticking on the stickers while his brother was busy on the computer.  each continent was labelled (and places that the kids were particularly interested in).

The kids loved this project and the finished result looks great.