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Where in the World, Winners, AND I'm back!

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I'm back! We had a fantastic vacation, too hard to pick any "favorites" but here are a few highlights of the past two weeks:

We visited Marine Land in Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada. It was fantastic! We had the opportunity to feed and touch beluga whales!!!!
Niagara Falls was unbelievable ;). We loved the Maid of the Mist boat ride (among other things....)

All and all, we traveled just short of 2100 miles. It was great! I'm sure I'll be sharing more of our adventures in the days to come.

Just before we left on vacation, our new globe arrived. We have a lot of maps, atlases, and puzzles of maps, inflatable globes, but we didn't have a "real" globe to explore. I decided to buy this one because Dane (and some of the other children) are wild about animals!
 Is this globe cool or what? There are animals on it all over the place! When you plug it in, it illuminates even more critters that you cannot see when the light is off in the oceans.
The children were very quick to start identifying locations they were familiar with. Then they started hunting down our animal cards and toy animals, matching the animals to their photos and location on the globe.
Right now, Australia is on their brains. (I think it might be because of the great little critters Donna from Irresistible Ideas for Play Based Learning sent to us!)
After we were finished with the cards and some of our toy critters; we took out the computer and started to do a little google research on some of the animals and places. We spun the globe and randomly stopped it by poking it with one finger. Whatever animal was under our finger was our research target. We had a great time learning about some of the more uncommon animals on our planet and their habitats!


I am really excited to be sharing some information with a couple of other folks about where we live through the "PAY IT FORWARD" project. We received a wonderful package about Tennessee from Scott over at Brick by Brick, and I am happy to report that I will be sending out 3 packages to the following folks:

Pam from How Long is This Hall
Greg from Males in Early Childhood Education
and
Stacey from Boys, Baking, and Bargains

Please drop me a personal email with your address so that I can get a great Upper Michigan package sent to you and your children!

I am still getting back into the swing of things, I am hoping to get back into my "normal" routine by the end of the week.

Comments

Play for Life said…
Welcome home Amy ... Man those beluga whales are awesome and so are our Aussie animals. I'm so glad Dane and the other children are having fun learning about them. That's a really awesome globe!!!
Donna :) :)
July 12, 2011 at 8:39 AM
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