Ben's Pick of the Week: Maps

I have previously mentioned Ben's love of maps - he loves looking at where things are in relation to each other, seeing where people live, and what is going on in different places.  We recently discovered this awesome book - Maps by Aleksandra and Daniel Mizielinska.  Maps is an over-sized atlas with intricate illustrations of continents and countries.  Within each map is information about the landscape of the given place, along with historical and cultural information, as well as detail about the types of plants and animals that live there.

I left the book out on our coffee table for Ben to discover.  It is so huge, there was no way he could miss it.  He has enjoyed flipping through it on his own and studying the illustrations and then asking me various questions about which country he's look at, why there are certain things in the country, whether we have those things where we live, etc.  It has been fun conversation starter in that way.  He has also enjoyed just flipping through each page and trying to figure out if there is some sort of drawing of a car on the page (Italy, Germany, and Japan were the favorites in this category).  He has let me sit down with him and actually read some of the factual information, but right now I think the visual sensory overload is so great that he's enjoying just having the book to himself.

Ben is learning about Africa in school right now (Egypt is his favorite African country), as well as about volcanoes, so this book has been a great compliment to those lessons. There is also a page in the back with a picture of the flags from each country and he has liked flipping from the country page to the flag page to show me where they are the same.  I'm looking forward to more discoveries as we continue to explore this book in the coming weeks!