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!

Okay, my posting of these has gotten sketchy. 

But I couldn’t pass up this week.  Now, granted, it’s not exactly a children’s book in that it’s for children, so much as it’s a book for parents of children.  That still counts, right?  I never was so good at following rules.  Even my own.

Home Learning Year by Year: How to Design a Homeschool Curriculum from Preschool Through High School
Written by Rebecca Rupp

(I have to say, if you order this book through my site right here, I get a cut from it.  So, click away and we all win!)

I forgot about this book, y’all.  Matt surprised me with this a year or two ago (a book I would have never bought for myself) and I love to go back through it periodically.

I have not read it all the way through.  I use it strictly for a reference book.  Adding another chapter each year as my children grow.  And I always go back through the previous chapters to see if I’m on track.

I had let a friend borrow it, completely forgetting about it, and when I got it back it was like a sweet present all over again!  

While reading the preschool chapter I was blessed again by these words and a sweet friend came to mind as I was reading them.  I wanted to share them with her, but then more and more of you came to mind as I thought of the encouragement that would come from them.  So for your encouragement today:

“What to do with your preschoolers?  Cuddle them.  Talk to them.  Answer their questions.  Play games.  Read picture books.  Let them help bake bread, sort socks, and plant the garden.  Make play dough.  Sing silly songs.  Feed the birds.  Scribble with crayons and sidewalk chalks.  Experiment with finger paint.  And just watch:  Amazingly, as they grow from infants to toddlers, from age two to three to four, they will acquire an ever-expanding vocabulary and amass an astonishing fund of knowledge.  In comfortable everyday fashion, they’ll learn to count to ten, absorb the names of shapes and colors, memorize nursery rhymes, the words to ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,’ and the alphabet, and figure out how to pedal a tricycle, turn a somersault, and – at least in our experience – to disassemble the toilet, crib, and clock radio, operate the telephone answering machine, coffee grinder, and computer, write their names (both backward and forward) on the wallpaper, and drop the entire contents of the silverware drawer down the radiator.

Kids grow up fast.  Cherish these early years while you’ve got them.  Henry David Thoreau could have been speaking to the parents of small children when he touted the beauties of daily living and the importance of taking time to pay heed to the marvels taking place about you.  ‘It is a great art,’ Thoureau once wrote, ‘to saunter.’  Such is my advice for the preschool curriculum: Saunter.  Hold hands and giggle while you’re doing it, and bring some bread along to feed the ducks.”

Want to link anything at all with us?  We’ll come visit and all be blessed!