Home and Maps Activity Book Reviews for Multicultural Monday

Disclosure: Candlewick Press gave me copies of these books free of charge to review. All opinions in my review are my own and I did not receive any other compensation. As in all my reviews I am providing links for your ease, but receive no compensation.

For Multicultural Monday I am sharing two fun books that you may not realize right away they are multicultural. The first is an activity book to accompany the book called Maps by Aleksandra Mizielinska and Daniel Mizielinski. The book we are reviewing is Maps Activity Book also by Aleksandra Mizielinska and Daniel Mizielinski.

This activity book has activities that are about real places and cultures as well as asking the child to use his or her imagination to create places and cultures. Hazel has really been enjoying these activities. I think her favorite was making up her own flag. She and my sister started a girls club which also includes me and our other sister and our mother. Hazel made a flag for the club. She included our girl club saying of "funny up" which came about when we were taking silly selfies of the three founding members.

 She did not bother to color the real flags though that may be because she didn't know what the actual colors are. She never asked me to look them up for her.

 She also enjoyed making up her own country. It includes fairies, unicorns and ducky fairies. 

 Hazel did her best to draw some of the Australian animals we have studied. She also started coloring in the kimono, but got bored.

 Another fun cultural activity in the book is drawing meals from three different places. Hazel was not sure what kind of food is served in Morocco so she is waiting for us to look it up.

 As you can see there are pages that teach about the countries and cultures from around the world. There are even pages that list various countries and ask the kids to draw a musical instrument from the country or a sport played there. Things to get the kids learning and comparing countries. It is such a fun activity book.

Our second book is  Home by Carson Ellis. This simple picture book shows many different types of homes for people, animals and made up places. It starts with a house in the country or an apartment in the city but goes to all sorts of things like a shoe or beehive. 

Image Source

 The book also shoes a home of Japanese business man and a Kenyan blacksmith. The illustrations are clear and fun and show many different ideas  and around the world as well as into space. It ends with the question, "where do you live?" This led us to doing an activity I saw a few years ago on-line but never tried. I did however buy some stackable plastic containers for it.

The stackable containers had five containers of different sizes. We also used one of Hazel's storage bins that happened to be empty. Depending on the number of containers you can make the levels different. The smallest container I labeled with our address. The next one up in size has our town name (if you have enough containers you could do the street name and/or neighborhood name). The next one has our state (you could use the county as well). The next one has our country. Then the largest has our continent and the storage box we labeled earth. Each of the small ones or more detailed home fits in the next so it give the child a true understanding of the various levels of details. I used masking tape to label the containers so we could change our labels and do different levels. The one I saw on-line included pictures and went to the child's bedroom as the smallest container. 

Anyway these are two educational books that get the reader/child thinking and imagining. I hope you will check them out!