I was given these product for the purpose of this review. All opinions provided are 100% my own.
We recently received the book My Very Own World Adventure from ISeeMe.com and instantly fell in love. Livia has lately been showing a lot of curiosity for the world around her and this book was the perfect way to encourage that curiosity while teaching. On top of being personalized to her, the book was a perfect mixture of fiction and non-fiction. This left her curious and asking questions while tapping into her imaginative side. The amount of culture learning experiences you and your child can have from this book truly are endless.
Each page of My Very Own World Adventure uncovers a new country for each letter in your child’s name. The illustrations are absolutely stunning, each created by an artist representing their own country. The entirety of the project was a collaboration of 63 artists from all over the world.
On top of this, for every My Very Own World Adventure book sold I See Me will donate $1 to Room to Read (non-profit) to help support global literacy.
After taking some time read the book, explore our maps and flags, and play online, we pulled out the craft box. I strongly believe that if your child is showing interest and curiosity in something to use that moment to teach. With Earth day right around the corner there has been all sorts of neat earth projects on Pinterest. Livia decided on a Papier-Mâché Globe which was a lot of messy sensory fun! Plus it turned out beautiful!!
Papier-Mâché Globe
Make your own globe of the Earth from Papier-Mâché. Although this is a messy project that takes days to complete, the results are very nice and teach a tremendous amount about geography.
Ingredients
- Something Round, balloon, plastic bags, etc
- Lots of Recycled Paper, we used Junk Mail!
- Flour
- Sugar
- Water
- Paint
- Paint brushes
- A dark marker
Instructions
Papier-Mâché Glue
- Boil 2 cups of water.
- Mix 2 cups of cold water with 1 cup of flour.
- Once water is boiling add cold water/flour mixture in.
- Stir until all clumps are gone. You can add more water as needed.
- Remove from heat and add 3/4 cup of sugar.
- Let cool and thicken before use.
Globe
- Find something to make a circle with (balloon, plastic bags, etc.) We used paper to be recycled and wrapped in in saran wrap.
- Rip up strips of paper.
- Soak strips in Papier-Mâché Glue and apply to globe shape.
- Cover the entire globe and let dry. This may take a couple of days.
Painting
- Pull out any maps you may have.
- Sit down with child and use a dark marker to draw out the outlines of the continents.
- Grab whatever paints you want to use and sit down and paint!
- Allow to dry and then put on display!
Nutrition Information:
Serving Size:
1 gramsAmount Per Serving: Unsaturated Fat: 0g
How the Papier-Mâché Globe Worked for Us:
When we started to do this globe we ran into a couple issues. First, we didn’t have a balloon and we live in a city that has a plastic bag ban…so we didn’t have any of those lying around either. However, we have a ton of paper to be recycled. So we took a bunch of paper, balled it up, and wrapped it in saran wrap to hold it’s shape.
I also did not have a newspaper lying around, so we went back to our scrap paper bin and ripped up junk mail. Who knew this craft would be so satisfying! We not only got to rip up our junk mail and bills, but make something beautiful out of it!!
It took about two days for this to dry entirely. The majority of it dried within 24 hours, however where it was sitting remained damp. Next time we do Papier-Mâché I will be putting it on some sort of rack to see if that speeds up drying times.
After it was dry we checked out our global wall map from Wall Monkeys along with pulling out our atlases. I absolutely adore our wall map. It is bright, colorful, easy to clean, and was ideal for this craft. Livia was able to see where the continents are and trace their shapes with her hands. It was a large enough visualization that it helped her translate into how it would fit on a globe since we do not actually have any globes in the house. She did refer to her book, My Very Own World Adventure multiple times to find those countries on the bigger map.
Once ready sit down and paint! We used green, blue, and white paints and mixed them as we went. It really was a blast! Once our globes were painted and dry we tracked down in the book where every country that represented a letter is and then sewed a fishing wire from the top of our globe to hang it for display!
