Geography project, by request

It's a little touchy deciding what to blog about when your kid is old enough to have opinions on what they want other people to know about them, but not experienced enough to understand exactly how a blog works.  I have been more frank on this blog than I am in conversations with people that we see every day, because it's read by people that either a) I would talk about these things with anyway because they are close friends or family members, or b) they are part of the community of families who adopt older kids, and this stuff is somewhat familiar and very relevant.  But I didn't want to be blogging behind Daniel's back, so to speak, so I have tried to explain to him what a blog is.  I told him it is kind of like QQ (the Chinese social networking site that he uses), except that people tend to write more and you can't live-chat.  He thinks QQ is far superior.  But he has enjoyed looking at pictures of a former orphanage friend whose family's blog I follow, and one day he suggested to me that I should put pictures of his (Daniel's) geography project on my blog!  So here is the first blog post not only permitted by commissioned by Daniel.

This was his first school project ever, and it was fun to get to do it with him.  The assignment was to make a relief map, in color, depicting a labeling at least 15 different geographic features.  Daniel's teacher said that she would accept any number from him.  He is not being graded in his class, but it was a project she thought he could do, and so she suggested it.  Since he does not have experience with projects, he had no idea where to start.  I helped him with it more than I would have for a middle-schooler who had grown up with me, but he did enough to "own" it and we had fun!  I suggested eight geographic features, which he agreed to, sketched out the boundaries of his map, made the dough, and gave him some help in filling the map in, especially with things like building up the mountains.  He did most of the filling in, and all of the painting, and practiced saying the names of the geographic features in English.  His teacher and I were both thrilled with the result.

Here is the construction process:

And here is the finished map:

Daniel labeled himself, too, just in case anyone was wondering.

And the most fun part of the project:  Destroying the map when it was all over!!