This month’s Geography Term Tour takes us to Peru – Land of the Desert Coasts – the Sechura Desert – which is over 188,000 square miles of Dunes.

This month we had free time at the library – thanks to the car being in the shop all afternoon.  So we took the time to look up Peru, South America and Dunes for January’s Geography Terms Blog Hop.

Using the supply of little squares of scratch paper, we jotted down favorite new to us facts about Dunes and Peru.

Then we came home to record our findings in our Geography Lapbooks.

Nate spent quite a bit of time working on his cute cartoon strip Epic Graphic Novel on Dunes. He made several drafts before cutting each square out to create each segment individually. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen him draft – to final – with this many steps before on his own.  Sniff. Sniff. They grow up. . . . .

Jon made a more simplistic Lapbook. He’s never been into the fancy folds and pies and pizza boxes. He likes – Fact on a paper, with one fold, on construction paper. Simple.

A Dune is a hill or ridge of sand piled up by the wind. So we thought about our beaches, and discussed the difference between “beach” and “dune”. Most of our sand has been piled up by water and tide movement. After looking up beach, we found it is the land that borders the ocean’s edge, which could be sand, rock or dirt. So – only the parts of sand that have been moved by wind would be considered “dune”.

We liked that the fog is called Garua – when Cold Salt Water hits the Dry Desert Air – a thick fog is created, for months, from June to August. Wow. Where does that sound familiar??? Oh. Ya. Advection Fog. When Warm air fronts travel over the Cold Water . . . . We looked it up – but really couldn’t tell the difference, excepting that one person said that Garua could be clear.

Jon liked the huts that they store Potatoes in.  Potato happens to be one of his spelling words this week. They had huts and massive amounts of potatoes in the photos.  We have read since that the potato was first domesticated in South America.

This was a great fun day at the library, and then at home. It was fun to be able to run browse  around the library chasing researching facts. It was fun to find South America on a different globe on and on different flat atlases than what we have at home. 

Where have you been this month in your geography? Do they have any sand that has been piled into hills or ridges by the wind?  Australia had the second largest sand dunes. . . .