Homeschool Biology: Make a Biome World Map

I love it when we cycle back to something that we've previously studied. Even though we don't specifically review, it's always clear to see what the children have retained, and even if they don't specifically have something retained, it's clear to see by how quickly they re-learn it that it was, indeed, still in there somewhere. So it's easy, then to be able to add depth and complexity and more interesting, sophisticated projects, which makes the topic of study even more fun than it was the first time!

This time it's biomes. We studied biomes back when each girl, in turn, was earning her Girl Scout Junior Animal Habitats badge, and again three or so years ago when they were studying California. And now we're cruising through biomes again as part of the CK-12 Biology curriculum.

The biome world map that I had the kids create together for this chapter is an extension of the biome pin flag map that each kid did for her Animal Habitats badge. This time, however, instead of using pin flags, I asked the girls to manually color the world map to illustrate the biomes.

And, for the very first time, I made them assemble the Megamap all by themselves, too. That is one tedious job that I am SO happy to hand over!

Along with the map, I asked the kids to annotate the legend with a one-sentence definition of each of the biomes. For now, the map and legend live on the wall behind our family computer station, and it's my sneaky hope that the kids might accidentally catch a glimpse of it every time they can tear themselves away from Minecraft:

P.S. If you need a simpler biome mapping project, check out this color-by-number biome map!