Our Nesting Geography Project

As we launch into a new school year, I'm also making some shifts with blogging here.  I'll try to write in more detail soon, and I am still hoping to finish a few posts from last school year that I already have the pics for (and was catching up on when my computer CRASHED and DIED! ugh).  

Anyway, the long and short of it is that I am not going to try to just keep up with the regular stuff of our weeks.  I don't have a lot to add into the mix of super talented, creative school bloggers who I basically just gather and sometimes adapt ideas from.  So, I'm pretty sure the grandparents are the only ones who truly benefit from all the details of our school week, and I can send them photos. :)

So, I'm going to try to shift to writing about things that are unique to us or to our life here in Nepal and a few projects I am excited about launching.  

This is one of the projects we started months ago and finally finished.  I have seen several ideas for "nesting" geography kinds of projects, mainly with boxes (which wasn't terribly feasible for us) or just with papers layered on top of each other.  I kind of wanted to combine the two forms and still make them fit inside of each other but use something more accessible to us than the boxes.  So, I decided to just use construction paper and make little pockets, getting larger with each expanding level.  (A note of hindsight here is that I might at least measure the biggest one first and then scale down from there, as by the time we got to the biggest one, we didn't have any construction paper big enough.  It kind of worked out because I had some cool Nepali handmade paper that I used for the largest two levels, but just to mention it.)

I think in the States you would basically have (from most specific to broadest) house, maybe neighborhood, city, state, country, continent.  That is 5, maybe 6, levels.  We ended up with 10 due to the way geography is labeled here.  So, that is why it took us awhile to finish because Isaiah got a bit weary with it after about the midpoint, and I ended up finishing it myself and then using it to just talk about with him.  

I actually really enjoyed this project personally because, as someone who didn't grow up here, I really didn't understand the hierarchy of the geographic labels here.  (And, for any of my Nepali friends who might see this, please forgive me if I have STILL made any errors in this!)  Many of the layers were a bit difficult to complete, as maps showing the clear boundary lines were hard to find, and there were a couple of the layers that seemed like we would be one but turned out in looking and digging that (I think) we are actually a different one.

Anyway, the idea is super simple and not entirely original, but I just put a photo of our house on the smallest level and then kept making bigger and bigger construction paper pockets and gluing a map on the front for each successive level.

For any who are interested, here is the breakdown of our Nepal geography:

The two obvious ones are that we are on the continent of Asia in the nation of Nepal.

Nepal is divided into five regions, and we are in the Central Region.  

Each region is divided into zones, and we are in the Bagmati Zone.

Within the zone, there are districts, and we are in Lalitpur.  

I actually listed the next level on the same pocket, as I could not, even with quite a lot of digging, find a map with lines of the municipalities shown.  Some said they thought we would be in Patan municipality, but it seems we are in a more recently defined one called Karya Binayak Municipality.

In the next level, VDC stands for Village Development Committee, and the name of ours is Sainbu.

I don't really know the name for it, but basically the level that is comparable to our town is Bhaisepati.

I have left the next two levels tucked in in the photo, as it feels a bit odd to put our exact location out into the general blogosphere, but it contains the name and a photo of our "colony" (which would be something like a subdivision or housing development in America) and then a photo of our home.

Many thanks to multiple Nepali friends who had the patience to help and TEACH ME for this project!