Landforms and Continent Map

The thing about cleaning out materials is that your children rediscover them.  This is what happened a few days ago, when I pulled out the homemade landforms.  J-jo wanted to know what the plasticene was doing in the containers.  It was past bedtime so I promised I would set it up on a mat for him in the schoolroom for the next morning.

Our landforms are not pretty, but the kids don't seem to mind.  I would much prefer owning these:

but these are what we have:

I introduced them all at once, although, per Montessori, I should have just done one pair.  However,  he retained their names fairly well (second part of a three part lesson - recognizing the landform if I called out its name), and tomorrow I plan on letting him choose only one pair to play with and learn. 
The boats help.  They are two tiny pieces of craft foam hot-glued together, with part of a toothpick with a triangular piece of paper as the sail.  The landform cards are half upside down because J-jo kept walking all around the mat and I kept trying to turn the cards so they would be right-side up for him.  Finally I just gave up.

J-jo liked pouring the water into the landforms and sailing his boat "around the cape," or "in the lake" and so on.  I think this is why he learned all the names so quickly.  "Isthmus" sure is a mouthful to say.

His other geography is learning the continents.  However, he doesn't often want to do our puzzle (of which I have zero pictures? I just searched over the past 6 months of photos on my computer and can't find a single one).  He much prefers to put the landmarks and animals (that are meant to be sorted onto the different continents) in lines and arrays anywhere on the map.  I sing him the song, while pointing to the puzzle pieces and he joins in singing, but he still refuses to let me know if he actually knows which continent is which.