Fun with Imaginary Islands

One of my favorite projects over the last five years has been making an Imaginary Island. The concept was introduced to the Montessori community in the 1980's by  Harvey Hallenberg, and other than inspiring creative play, the Imaginary Island was multipurpose. Younger children could learn major geographical features such as; island, ocean, river, lake and valley.  While older children could go beyond the basics learning; peninsula, bay, estuary, atoll and so on.

I have to admit that this project was really daunting, which is probably why it's been a work in progress for the last 5 years, lol! I have slowly been working on features (such as texture for the hills) and plan on laminating each piece when finished. I began the project by making a list of  what geographical features I wanted displayed on our map, and then after trying to badger my husband into drawing it for me, I broke down and sketched it out. To make the puzzle, I bought blue and green poster board and copied my Island onto it freehand, cut out the pieces and then glued the green land over it to match. One side of the puzzle piece contains the island while the other has a number and geographical feature written on it.

1. cliff                                                                   8. cape                                                           

2. hills                                                                   9. lake    

3. beach                                                                10. valley                                                     

4. cove                                                                  11. bay

5.  river                                                                 12. peninsula                                                           

6. prairie                                                               13. atoll              

7. ocean                                                                14. estuary                                                        

                                                        
Here's how I work with the Imaginary Map with my preschooler. First we pull out our air, land, and sea cards. These are laminated, color-coded cards with animals, people and places on them. She sorts them into piles based on where she would find that item, and if she gets confused she can turn them over and look on the back for the answer and we can talk about it. Air is coded with yellow, land brown, and sea blue.

    At times all she wants to do is sort the colored sticker dots on the opposite side!

 Afterwards we get out our map and various toys and,"play." I let her put it together however she likes and we talk about and point out any major geographic landmarks we can spot, (e.g., island, ocean, river, lake). Then we discuss the animals on our map; which are mammals, amphibians, reptiles? Which give live birth or lay eggs?

Okay...so you don't find giraffes on islands in the ocean, but we had fun anyway!

For basic nomenclature practice, I made definitions to go with the labels and printed them on cardstock and laminated. With my first grader we put the map together and we sort through our landform labels and definitions and find all of the geographic features on the map.

She isn't quite up for matching landforms to their definitions yet, usually I read the definitions aloud to her and let her find the place on the map where the label goes.

For those of you interested in making your own map, here's the geographic landform label and definition document. Feel free to print them out for your own use!

Geographic landform Document

From Peaceful Mann Geography Montessori and More:

My imaginary Island Worksheet