Saturday, February 23, 2013

A WHALES Unit for Young Children

This is an old article I wrote about Unit Studies. I still believe the same - that I need to write our own units. Douglas is currently 9 and Charles 7.

 

I make up all of our units now. The main reason is that most units have information that is not at the level I currently need or is missing materials that we feel led to cover. I believe that the truly best unit for my grandsons is one that we put together ourselves.
 
Most units just evolve on their own--following the questions and interest of the child(ren) involved. Take our unit on whales as an example.
 
My daughter found a video on oceans at the library which the boys loved. Douglas (age 3 1/2) just kept talking about the whales. So I got out a book he had on whales at his level. We read it and he wanted more. How do I know? He was willing to re-read this book, pointing and talking about all the pictures. I asked him if he wanted to know more about whales and I got an entusiastic YES!
 
The only "planning and preparation" I did was to collect materials. I went through all the books that the boys had and pulled out several on whales and oceans. Then I went to my files and pulled out four folders I had on oceans. I went through the material and pulled out information/books/etc that I thought would be of interest to Douglas (and Charles, 22 months, IF he wanted to participate, which he has done for short spells and then he wanders off to do his own things).
 
Then all we did was to re-read the original whale book and as we did we talked about some of the information that I felt he could understand and retain. I wrote about 25 question/answer cards while we did this. These will be used to play a board game I plan to make. Then Douglas wanted to watch the whale movie again so he did that while taking his afternoon "rest" -- quiet time while Charles naps.
 
Next we read several more books, and some we just looked at pictures. Douglas noticed numbers on the Table of Contents page which led to a lesson on reading numbers 11-30. He had so much fun asking what was on a given page by seeing the number and having me tell him what he would find on that page. Then he would turn to the page and be so excited that what I had told him was really there. We had to do this for every page listed in the Table of Contents of this and one other book. The second book also had an Index and he wanted to know what that was, so I explained and showed him how things listed there were in the same order as the letters in his ABC song...teaching him the term alphabetical order. Does he really understand all these concepts? Maybe/maybe not, but at least they have been introduced and we will review them every chance we get.
 
In another book he found a fold-out map showing the continents and oceans and a variety of animals that live in each. He loved naming all the animals and learned the names of two new animals (weasel and lynx). While we were looking at the whales and dolphins pictured I told him there are four oceans, told him their names and showed him their locations. We repeated this information several times and as we drill it he will memorize them and we will then work on the names of the continents. He brought up how the map was like his globe which he loves. He was able to find the general location of Wisconsin which he can do by finding the Great Lakes.
 
A couple of the books we read Douglas was able to sound out many of the words. After I told him a couple of the words (whale, ocean) that were repeated on many of the pages he was able to read these as well. He also noticed page numbers in one of the books and we had to turn every page and state the page number to 36.
 
He colored a picture of some whales. He cut out some pictures from my files and pasted them on a sheet of blue construction paper. Then he had me spell "Whales" so he could write it on the top of the page.
 
While he was doing this art work, I cut out some pictures from an ABeka math book of whales in 4 different colors. I put them on little 1 1/2 inch squares. We used these to make some sequences (red, blue, green, red, blue ____ - What comes next?). We also did some story problems (Here are two blue whales and here comes one more blue whale. Now how many whales are there? --- did some subtraction ones also.) Then we talked about more and less. I would make two piles of whales and he would count them and tell me which pile had more.
 
At "rest" time he watched the Veggie Tale movie "Jonah and the Whale."
 
The only other "school" we did most of this time was to drill some phonics and read a few phonics readers. But our unit covered: Science, math, reading, geography, logical thinking skills, art, language arts, and vocabulary. Pretty good for just time of fun with Grandma.
 
And we will continue it as long as they stay excited about the topic. Then we will revisit this topic again as they get older and dig deeper into it.

Thursday, February 21, 2013

Grandfather Tang's Story

A Tale Told with Tangrams


 

This morning we read a delightful book by Ann Tompert. Grandfather Tang's Story tells the story of two fox friends who begin a game of changing themselves into other creatures. It becomes dangerous and a game of chase when one becomes a rabbit and the other a dog.


 


The children enjoyed the fast pace of the story and the exciting changes made by the characters. As each change is made there is picture of the tangram creatures Grandfather used to tell his story.

 
When the story finished Charles used his tangrams to create the different creatures from the story. Here he is making the goldfish.


Diana and Wesley used a little easier book of tangram designs to make...

 
Then the children had some fun creating creatures and other designs on their own. 
 
WE LOVE TANGRAMS!
 
The children and I would recommend this fun book. The children found the story exciting and anxiously waited for me to turn the page and see what new creature was there. I found the story enjoyable to read, and love how it captured their interest. It would be a great book if studying shapes or China. It is also a wonderful "just for fun" book.


Friday, February 15, 2013

Roman Numeral Coins

After reading Fun with Roman Numerals by David Adler, Charles was all excited about playing Roman soldiers and thought it would be cool to have some coins. So.....we made some.
 
Using Air-Dry Clay we formed our coins.


 
We used a stamp set I had and added images of Roman Numerals to each of the coins. We made I, V, X, L, C, D, and M coins.
 
 
 
We placed them on a cookie sheet and began the drying in a low temperature oven.
 
 

 Next we painted the coins using...

which I bought at WalMart. This paint was great because it washed off and it has pretty gold glitters.
 
 
 
 

Diana

Douglas
 
Wesley

Charles




 

Our fun time with clay and paint and a couple days of patience for things to dry and we ended up with..... 
Gold Roman Coins
 
Then the fun began. We played money games with Roman money - making purchases of horses, chariots, supplies, food, and weapons. We made payments and received change.

We also practiced making numbers with our coins. Here we make 45.
 
 
The boys also did a lot of playing Roman soldiers and mostly carried the coins around in pouches they made from plastic zip baggies and fastened to their belts.
 
 
We discovered that Roman Numerals are not difficult. In fact, they are FUN...just as David Adler had said in his book.
 
 
Check out a game we made, Roman Numerals Oh Nuts!