Africa Unit: Basic Facts About Africa

As I’ve mentioned before, we are studying World Cultures this year and are starting with Africa. Last week we started with some basic facts and the geography of Africa.  We’re using a really terrific basic textbook on Africa that has lots of pictures and is wonderful for the ages of my kids.  The first few days we worked through this Africa Learning Packet I created that was loosely related to the readings we did. So while the map below has the Sudan as part of North Africa, we did not include it in the sheets below because our text has the Sudan as part of East Africa.

The kids were really blown away by the true size of Africa. They were amazed how large it is.

Download the Africa Learning Packet: 

We used the flags of Africa from Montessori Materials  to create country pins for our pin map (African Flags-page 1;  African Flags-page 2).  We simply printed out the geography of Africa page and taped it onto cork board (and idea from my blogging friend over at We Don’t Need No Education).

And for a couple of days while I read aloud the kids colored in some of the north African flags.  We mostly used flags from the Flag Coloring Sheet website, though you’ll see a couple of bookmarks from Activity Village.  The kids often like to be doing something while they listen. Incidentally, I was reading aloud The Chronicles of Narnia — not anything related to Africa! I’m saving the storybooks until we talk about specific countries and their history.

 Other related posts you might find of interest:

• These posts on Ancient Egypt which also includes a free notebook page about the Ancient Egyptian Gods and Goddesses worksheets 

• Learning about Islam — Free Worksheets and Resources for Kids (We learned the religion of Islam and then learned about the spread of Islam across North Africa and down into West Africa.)

• West African History — Free Notebook Pages, African Picture Books – which includes these free pages

• Geography of Africa — The Countries and Physical Features
• West African Art Projects: Morrocan Tiles, African Masks, African Music
• Learning about West Africa: Children’s Games and more
• Cooking with Kids: A Taste of Africa and the Middle East
• The Transatlantic Slave Trade and Slavery in the New World (includes free notebook pages)

• World Facts Packet