Kids Craft: Administrative Divisions Study and Flags T-Shirt

For a while, the six year old was into Administrative Divisions of the countries of the world - be it Russia's oblasts and krais, or Germany's Bundesländer, India's states, he wanted to know their names and their flags.

Armed with an oversized and large parchment paper, he traced many countries with their administrative divisions and colored them in, to make his own book of Admin. Divs.

This enthusiasm got me pumped and I ended up making a unique Admin Divs. Flags shirt for his birthday. He claims that's the best birthday gift, second only to a book we gave him. The shirt front has flags of 6 Russian oblasts, krais and republics; the back of the shirt has 6 German Bundesländer flags.

Flags of the World and Elements

After a round of learning about Countries of the World, it was a natural organic progression to learning about the Flags of the World.

Smithsonian Handbook: Complete Flags of the World started it all for us. Some activities the kid enjoyed after learning most of the flags of the world:

• Match the countries with the flags - we do 3 to 5 at a time, to not overwhelm
• Given a flag picture, identify the country
• Flag coloring pages - given just the outline and the country name, try to color it in correctly
• Given a flag type, name a country's flag that is of that type. Example,  Serration (Qatar), Fimbriated (Guyana), Triangle (Zimbabwe), Quartered (Martinique) and so on
• Given a country's flag, identify its type as best as possible (Triangle and Fimbriated can be confusing for some)

There are printable activities at Enchanted Learning, some of which were much enjoyed by the younger child. Of course, there are many nice apps that made learning flags fun.

After decades of being blissfully uninterested about flag types, I can finally identify a few common types like Saltaire, Scandinavian Cross, Fimbriated, Quartered, Serrated, Triangle, besides the usual Tricolor, Tribar, Bicolor and Cross. Plus the typical parts of the flag like the Canton and Fly and Charge...

The toughest for me was to draw and color the flag, given a country name. The easiest, of course was to match the countries and flags. I rely on short-term memory to get through these activities, but, after a few months of no reiteration, am sure I'd have to start over from scratch and learn it all again.

Now, a while back, we studied the Periodic Table of Elements.  So when I came across this collation by Jamie Gallagher at Smithsonian.com, it gave us an idea for a wonderful activity to combine two of the kid's interest to make an extension activity with elements and flags.