My Thoughts on Expedition Earth

*This is not a sponsored review.* I bought the digital download of Expedition Earth several years ago and never used it. I found it in my files last summer when I was planning our homeschool year and thought it would be fun to use with Mercie, Silas, and Titus. I wanted us to have a "together" subject, or "family school" as we call it. Mercie is 6th grade, Silas is 4th grade, and Titus is 2nd grade.

We loved Expedition Earth. It has been a really fun year, full of crafts and books, learning about other countries. In all, we will have "visited" 29 countries (we still have three left - New Zealand, Antarctica and The Poles and we skipped two countries). Expedition Earth consists of two downloads - the Teacher's Guide and the Student Workbook. I bit the bullet and printed out the entire Teacher's Guide and three copies of the Student Workbook and I am *so glad* I did! It was wonderful to have everything we needed already printed out and in binders. I put the Teacher's Guide in page protectors in a 2-inch binder. I put the Student Workbooks in 2-inch binders, as well, but I wish I would have put them in 3-inch binders! Our binders are overflowing!

I put 8 dividers in each binder - one for the world, one for each continent. Behind each divider, I put an empty page protector to put all of our flat crafts, postcards, fold-outs, and anything else flat that went along with that continent. Then I put all of the worksheets for that continent behind each divider and page protector.

The go-along books I used with Expedition Earth are:

• A Trip Around the World
• Another Trip Around the World
• Galloping the Globe
• Children's Atlas of God's World
• Usborne Encyclopedia of World Geography
• Children Just Like Me

Planning was super easy. Each week, I would go to the library and get books for the country we would be studying the next week. If we couldn't find any or there was a book I really wanted that the library didn't have, I would place an Amazon order. I also looked on our bookshelves for books that would tie-in. Each Saturday or Sunday, I would look ahead in the Teacher's Guide and get a general idea of what we were going to learn. I looked in the Trip Around the World books to see if it covered that country, and if so I would look for additional activities or worksheets and make copies or gather supplies. I also looked on Pinterest for a few fun crafts from that country. If I needed to buy something extra for the crafts or activities, I would run to the store that weekend.

Our weeks followed a similar rhythm:

• Monday: We would fill out our passports and glue the flag inside along with the date. We would read from the Children's Atlas of God's World, then find the country on our map, color and label it. Next we would fill our "Country Fact Sheet" with the country, capital, population, language, religion, and government type. We usually did a craft on Mondays.

• Tuesday: We would read a library book and then color the flag worksheet, reading about the flag design. We would finish the craft from yesterday if necessary.

• Wednesday: We would read from "Children Just Like Me" and complete the accompanying worksheet. We would read library books, too. Sometimes we did another craft.

• Thursday: We would read from the "Trip Around the World" books if they included that country, and do a worksheet or activity from the book. If the books didn't cover the country we were studying, we would usually do a worksheet I found online, sometimes just a crossword or word search, sometimes a map or learning worksheet. We would also do any experiments or extra activities that were in Expedition Earth.

• Friday: We would make our postcards and fold-outs. We would read any library books we had left. We would finish any crafts or activities from the week. We would review the country facts and some from previous countries.

postcard and fold out for Panama

Here are just a few of our favorite activities from the year:

Australian Aboriginal Boomerangs

Nigerian Quicksand Experiment

African Savannah Dioramas 

Kenyan Beads

Panamanian Molas

Peruvian Pan Pipes

Mexican Sombreros

Balloons on the first day of school to kick off our world geography lessons!

Cinnamon rolls with little world flags to make things fun!

Kites when we studied Korea!

Homemade fortune cookies when we studied China!

We had a blast this year with Expedition Earth! It was simple to plan, fun to implement and I think the kids learned a lot about different world cultures. In fact, we loved it so much, I bought Road Trip USA from the same author to use with Silas and Titus next year! It looks even more fun, and I'm already collecting books.