Olympic/Canada Projects

Pepper made a TV to display what she learned about Canada and the Winter Olympics. We used a kleenex box (well, ok, Target brand facial tissue, if you want to avoid trademark infringement) and I made "screens" on half-sheets of paper. She drew or wrote her information in each screen and then we taped them all end-to-end and rolled them up on dowels. You turn the dowels to advance the screens. It turned out very cute!

Pepper proudly shows off her TV

 

The Canadian flag

Ancient Greek Government (the line of guys in the bottom left corner are standing in line to vote in their democracy!)

 

Ever wanted to see inside a TV?

The ends of the screen-strip are taped to the dowels.  We poked a small hole, just big enough for the dowels in the top of the box.  The bottom end of each dowel sits inside a large paper clip taped to the inside bottom of the box.  This keeps the dowels straight and in place and keeps the screen roll near the front of the box.

Here is Banana Boy's not-quite-finished lapbook:

"Canada and the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic Games"

Canada/British Columbia section

Olympic section (a little sparse)

Individual sports.  BB wrote a little about each sport inside the little books.

Daisy made a similar lapbook, but of course put much more time and effort into it.

 

Ancient Olympics section.  Booklets are a combination of the two lapbook kits mentioned here.

  

Modern Olympics section.  It includes a calendar of the dates of the 2010 Olympics, a map of the torch relay, a tri-fold brochure of British Columbia, a booklet about the torch, the Canadian flag, a chart showing distances from our area to former Olympic host cities, a booklet about the opening ceremonies, an Olympic acrostic poem, a medal count, map of participating countries and a report on an outstanding Canadian.  Inside shots of some of the booklets are below.

  

 

Medal-winning countries in selected events

Olympics and Canada

Part of Sonlight Core 4 includes a study of Canada.  I think it is scheduled near the end of the year, but when I began to plan for studying the Olympics, I had an aha! moment and pulled out the Canada book to tie in.

So we've been making lapbooks.  We've learned about Canada using Sonlight's book A Unit About Canada.

This has been a very nice study.  We were fairly choosey about which pages we did.  I copied off many of the pages with fill-in-the-blank answers and after we'd read about the topic, I had either Daisy or Pepper do the writing while everyone chimed in with the answers.  I didn't feel it was necessary, nor productive, to have each one complete their own sheet.  Between the reading, the discussion and the worksheet, I think they all got a good grounding in the topics.  I also had whomever hadn't filled out the sheet check it over for accuracy.

This book was also nice in that I was able to find activities within suitable for Daisy, Pepper AND Banana Boy.  He enjoyed the maps.  We also did some extensions with him about tides when we read about the world's highest tides in the Bay of Fundy.  He chose to read about Michael J. Fox when they each chose an "Outstanding Canadian" to report on.  Why would he know MJF?  Mr. GT and the kids are movie addicts on the weekends when I am at work, and they've seen all the Back to the Future movies!

After a general overview of Canada, we focused in on British Columbia because that's where the 2010 Winter Olympics are, in Vancouver.  There's a page in the book with 6 different province-study topics and each of them took two.  We checked out a bunch of books from the library on BC and the kids set to work investigating.  Daisy and Pepper were able to find answers to their questions and record notes pretty well on their own.  BB and I worked together to explore natural resources, crops and manufacturing and food, sports and attractions.  He made a little book about logging with coloring pages I found on the internet and colored a picture of salmon for his lapbook.  I think I'll have him do a hockey page, too.

Finally, for the Olympics study, I bought two lapbooks from CurrClick.  CurrClick is a wonderful place to buy e-books and instant download lapbooking sets.  They have a nice selection of freebies and often have sales, plus they carry products from many different companies.  If you get on their weekly newsletter mailing list, you get a new freebie each week and it's a good way to sample each company's product.  I've definitely found I don't like all lapbooking kits. Some companies are much more to my taste than others.

We used A Journey Through Learning's 2010 Winter Olympics lapbook and Live N Learn's Winter Olympics lapbook.  AJTL's lapbook was a nice fit for Banana Boy, with much simpler, broader activities.  LnL's kit contained very specific and deep projects exploring the olympics and was a good match for Daisy's skills.  Pepper worked a bit from both and I selected just the projects and booklets we needed and tossed the rest.

If you are considering purchasing either, the Live N Learn kit is not year-specific and could be used as-is over again for another Winter Olympics.  The Journey Through Learning set is specific to the 2010 Olympics, but only in a few places (mascots, themes, map of the torch trek).  Much of it could be used again another time and it's on sale right now for only $3.75!  It would be a great value to purchase now and use again next time.  You could adapt the year-specific activities to the new olympics fairly easily with a little internet research.

A few other online things I collected from www.activityvillage.co.uk

An Olympic acrostic and a Distance to Travel worksheet

I'll post pictures of the lapbooks when we have them finished--hopefully that will be by tomorrow, since Grandma and Grandpa are coming!

Finished the Civil War

We finished the Civil War a bit ago.  The girls made lapbooks from History Pockets: Civil War.  I shrunk the printables from this book to make smaller-sized booklets to use in their lapbooks.

Our favorite Civil War resources?


Across Five Aprils

We listened to this book on audio, rather than me read it. I have a hard time reading dialect aloud. It is available from iTunes or audible.com.  This book is the (roughly) true story of the author's grandfather who was a boy of 12 or 14 when the Civil War began.  He remained on the farm while his older brothers went off to war and the story chronicles the war through all five Aprils, 1861-1865.  It's a wonderful, moving story that captures you and gives a fabulous overview of the war through the eyes of Jethro and his family.

We also listened to Bull Run on audio (also purchased from iTunes). LOVE this book! I prefer the audio version of this book because of the format of the story. It consists of about 15 characters, each speaking in his own chapter. The characters vary between male & female, North & South, slave & free, rich and poor, soldier and civilian. All meet in some way at the battle of Bull Run and through their collective perspective, you experience that battle. LOVE this book!

Besides listening to the audio version, which offers a different voice for each character, we also make a chart of the characters' names, their affiliation (north or south), a few words about their story (who they are) and their role at Bull Run.  This book can be a little confusing because of the number of characters, but the audio and the chart help us to keep it straight.


We read Lincoln: A Photobiography and a few Cornerstones of American History books.

To celebrate the end of our Civil War unit, we took a day-trip to Springfield, IL to visit the Lincoln Museum and his home there.

Lincoln's Home is a national park site and is a free tour.

The Lincoln Museum is part of his presidential library.  If you are within driving distance of this museum, I encourage you to go there!  It is a wonderful, interactive museum that traces Lincoln's life from his early log cabin days through his time in Springfield, the White House and to his death.  There are two really great holographic movies, lots of realistic wax (I think they are silicon nowadays) figures, a coverage of slavery and the Civil War, and actual items that belonged to the Lincolns.  The cost is $10 for adults and $6 for kids, but it seemed worth it to us.

We had actually visited this museum on our vacation to St. Louis two years ago and the kids were STILL talking about going here.  Since they had such fond memories of it, I thought it would be fun to revisit it now that that period in history was "explained" in their minds.  They liked it just as well the second time.

Also in Springfield are Lincoln's tomb, where he and his family are buried and the village of New Salem where Lincoln lived and worked before he became an esteemed lawyer.  We didn't visit those two places on this trip.  (We saw his tomb 2 years ago)  If you can't visit the tomb in person, you can take this photo tour.

Bird Study Lapbook

Here is the culmination of Banana Boy's bird unit. We made a lapbook together and I think he did a great job!


The photo makes it a little hard to read. It is called "All About Birds." BB chose the title himself.He drew a robin, a red-winged blackbird and a cardinal flying (if you click on the picture, you can see them better)

Here is the inside.

His bird-watching journal. It says, "What I saw: 'a blak bird. it was big.'"


His booklet titled, "What is a Bird?"


I love the picture for "Birds are warm-blooded." He drew a penguin walking in a snowstorm (keeping itself warm with its warm blood).

Resources for Bird Unit

Next up: The Solar System.

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!

More Lapbook photos

Here are Daisy and Pepper's Native Lapbooks.  You already saw two of Daisy's.  She is making an individual folder for each Indian group we study.  Pepper is doing 4 in 1 and you'll see her first three.  Next week we will complete the final group and make a folder for the Northwest Coast Indians.

 

Daisy's is first and is orange.  Pepper's is second and is green and then blue.  I tried to make the slides longer this time so you can see what's in the folder better.

 

A note about Pepper's folder.  She made flap books comparing the cultures.  Each book has a section for Houses, Transportation, Food, Clothing, Toys.  We only show you one page from each.  You'll see the food page for the Woodlands and the Transportation page for the Plains.  To see the other pages, you'll have to come and visit us!

 

Native Lapbooks  (click the link)

 

 

American Indian Lapbooks

Here are Daisy's completed lapbooks--the first two.  If you click on the link below, it will take you to a slide show of the insides.  You might have to watch it twice to catch it.  I can't slow down the slideshow on Photobucket and I'm too tired to redo it somewhere else.

 

I'll post pictures of Peppers when she is finished.  She's still working on hers.

 

American Indian Lapbooks  click the link to watch the slideshow (I hope)