Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Science

I never really liked science during school. I remember finding some of it interesting but overall, I never did very well and never would place it as one of my favorites. That has changed since I've been homeschooling. I am finding it absolutely fascinating.

For the first few years with the two oldest, we followed The Well Trained Mind's guide to teaching science. We did lots of library books and a few little experiments. We weren't perfect by any means, in fact our dedication had a lot to be desired. However we did enjoy scrounging for books in the library that interested us and reading them and discussing them.

This year I switched and bought Jeannie Fulbright's "Flying Creature's of the Fifth Day." Wow do I ever like this book. Now that the range of my children's abilities is from pre-school to 5th grade, I wanted something that would work for all of them at the same time. This does! It challenges the two older ones yet allows the little ones to join in the discussions without feeling overwhelmed.

Mrs. Fulbright has notebook pages to download and use for the book and they are great. The older ones have lines for writing a summary of what they remember from our reading (and I am amazed at how well they remember and are doing well at articulating their thoughts). The younger version is mainly for drawing while I also will have them dictate to me what they remember.

Currently we are in the middle of studying birds. The kids helped dad build bird houses to hang and watched to see which birds would move in and build their nests. We've also hung up bird feeders and now enjoy watching several goldfinches enjoying their meals while we are enjoying ours or are working in the kitchen. We're waiting for orioles to find our feeder and hope that other birds will find the suet we made.

Most days one of the kids will be scouring through our field guide book trying to identify a bird or just look up their favorites; while another kid has the binoculars looking at a particular bird in hopes of identifying it.

Next year we will work through Mrs. Fulbrights Astronomy book, and then as the following years come we'll proceed through the others. Check them out if you haven't already.

1 comment:

Kristi said...

We purchased Astronomy and didn't get to it, but will be doing it this summer. We are going to do the first Zoology Book this fall in a coop and I am hoping that the coop will continue on with the second book in the spring. She is a great author.