Invitation to Travel the Globe

We are super lucky to have an international background as a family and we try our best to keep those memories going.

We were kindly gifted this GeoSafari Jr. Talking Globe by Educational Insights for purpose of review. All opinions and images are our own and completely genuine. This post contains affiliate links.

Our family of four has quite the international background. My husband and I are English, but as a child I grew up in Canada. After we got married we decided to experience living abroad and moved to Thailand where I taught for nearly 5 years. Bangkok is also where our son, who is now 5 years old, was born. When he was 3, we made the move to America and a few months later baby sister was born. Add to the mix the fact that my parents have now retired to live in France, and my brother currently lives in Myanmar, and we have quite an interesting collection of experiences!

This can be rather confusing for our kids, and I think it is best summed up by the fact that my son still refers to different countries as 'different worlds'. To him, all these places are so far away from each other and so incredibly different. We always try to share lots of memories and stories about the places we have lived and visited, but having visual prompts is so much more powerful for kids. So I set up this fun invitation to explore the world using our new Educational Insights Talking Globe, and some of our keepsakes from our time in Thailand.

I loved how excited my son was when he saw the set up. He fondly talked about all the tuk tuk rides we took, the street food smells, and the elephants we saw by the side of the road on our travels. He thought it was pretty cool putting on his Thai outfit too!

We then spent some time using the interactive globe to learn some fun facts about Thailand.The smart stylus pen is very kid-friendly, just touch it to a country, city, animal or ocean and hear the fun facts.

My son quickly wanted to do the same for where we now live in America. As soon as he started to move the globe to find America he commented 'wow that's a long way away'. The cool thing with the globe is that you can actually measure how far away the two destinations are! It even tells you the flight time.

I liked how the globe naturally prompted so many questions from my son. He was fascinated to see all the places where our family are located and how long it takes to travel there.

We also used the opportunity to start learning the names of the oceans and continents. This was great for his letter recognition and literacy skills as well.

We finished off by working together to try out the 'Find It' quiz. This was really good fun and was a great way to apply what he had learnt about each of the countries.

Does your family have a diverse geographical story? How do you support your kids in their knowledge of these locations? Using a globe was a great hands-on way to do this, and we sure did have fun with all the props!