Welcome back to Children’s Book Tuesday! This week, again, I’m giving you a curriculum book that I’m loving right now. That same sweet friend who gave me last week’s pick also gave us a couple of Usborne Science kits. I’ve heard about them before, but had never seen them. Wow. I LOVE them! We started right off with the Human Body (amazing – when we got this we had just started a human body unit study). It has this book and a couple of others that come with it.
I did a little looking around and found the official Usborne site – it has sets you can order, individual books, and close out deals. And this site that lists each book clearly and shows you an example of one of the 10 week studies. As with most curriculum “sets” it was a little pricey – $50 for the complete Human Body study (though, I’m so in love with them, it may be added to our curriculum budget). And I’m sure you can find them in bits and pieces, once you’ve determined what’s in a set, at homeschool used book fairs. Inside this book is a Quick-Links section that you can go online and the kids can play online games related to their lessons.
Here is an example of one of our lessons. (I told my four year old girl to cut out pictures of food from a stack of magazines sitting on the table and inadvertently left my Usborne book out too. I turned around to find that she had cut out every piece of food from the Usborne book. I was able to just tape it back together.)
We then made a huge food pyramid. Each section of the pyramid was one sheet of printer paper. I measured to the center of each sheet and drew a line to the corner. Then just pieced them together. And had the older 3 write (or copy) the correct foods and servings onto the pages. If I could change anything I would’ve used a different color for each food group to make it clearer.
Then we cut out food from magazines. I piled the food pictures all in the floor and had the kids line up and bring their food to me while I taped each one in the correct food group. The 8, 6, and 4 year olds chose the groups on their own. The 2 year old had more help, but still participated. This was an activity that we spread out over several days. (Are ya kidding me? We never would’ve been able to do all that in one day!)
This is the same study that we made the full people a few weeks back. We’ve checked to see the capacity of our lungs, we’ve made an obstacle course out back of how the heart works, we taste tested sour, bitter, sweet, and salty, and I’ve answered more questions in our “non-school” time because their minds are thinking so much about the lessons.
Do you have a children’s book you love? Doesn’t have to be curriculum, but that’s great too. MckLinky is broken this week, so leave me a comment with the link of the post (not just your site) and include a link in your post back to me. Then we can have a carnival and all come visit each other. Please share your favs!
