Kickin' Off the New School Year: Birds

Oh, cool. I have been successful at something homeschooling!

I've been messing around with Banana Boy's science curriculum forever (think: all summer) and yesterday, I finally just grabbed some books and decided to make it simple.

Me? Simple! Ha, that never happens in homeschool planning.

I collected some bird books (I decided now is the time to study birds) and some reproducibles and made some copies. Today I hauled all the kids off to Staples to buy fun new paper.

Then I came home and set up a lapbook.

Now, I've tried lapbooks with the girls and they are really lukewarm over them. Pepper basically hates them. Daisy will putter with hers on and off. RoseBud wouldn't ever touch one with a ten-foot pole.

But Banana Boy, who spent a year in public school Kindergarten, has been groomed to enjoy worksheets.

I began with the brilliant idea to make all the books AND plot out exactly what to put into them before I let him see it. With the girls, I've always tried to invent the wheel as we went along and they got frustrated waiting for me to tell them what to put in a book, decide what kind of book and make the little book.

HELLO! If you buy a pre-made lapbook kit, they've already done all that for you. Kid colors, kid writes, kid cuts out, kid maybe folds a little and kid glues book in.

So, I made and outline of the info I wanted him to learn, cut and folded all the little books and laid them out in the folder. (Do you have no idea whatsoever what I'm talking about? Look HERE.)

THEN I showed it to him. "Look, BB. For science, we're going to learn about birds and you're going to make this folder. See, in this little book, you'll write about what makes a bird a bird. In this book, you'll glue these little pictures about how an egg hatches." And onward and upward.

His little eyes lit up and he began to jump up and down. "Can we start NOW? Can I make it?"

And so, seizing the moment, I sat Sunshine and him down on the couch with me and we read our first book. Sunshine, for all his hyperactivity and gnat-like attention span, LOVES to be read to, AND he listens to the book!

At the end of the book is a glossary. The very first thing BB wanted to do was write down his Bird Words. He carefully wrote each and every word from the glossary onto the feather shapes I had made and then threaded each one, upside-down (so they would be right when flipped over) onto the brad. He was also careful to follow the blue-yellow pattern of the feathers.

Did I mention all this was happening around 6:30 pm after dinner?

Look how cute he is when he cuts!

He completed two and half mini-books for his folder before he lost interest.

I think I've found a winner for this child!