Shabby Blog Wheels on the Bus

Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Remembering and understanding

Even though I love (and the kids love) our history curriculum this year (Winter Promise's Hideaways in History), for a 5- and 7-year-old, even the 2-page read-aloud lessons can seem to drag on at times.

Sometimes the meat of the main idea gets lost in their minds among the names and dates and other details.

To make sure they get the main idea out of some lessons, I came up with the idea of having them draw things they heard me talk about.




Mr. Tinker prefers to draw a grid at the start of the lessons and draws a picture in each box as I read along.

At the end, they can recite the main points of what I've talked about by following along their pictorial hints. These also make nice additions to our notebooking!

(This could easily be applied to any other read-aloud lessons in other subjects....or even fictional storytime.)

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Finishing up the OT

Mr. Tinker's Bible/handwriting curriculum (My Father's World) asks him to read a story from the Old Testament each day and then write a sentence summary of it, followed by an illustration in his Bible Notebook.

We wrapped up the OT this week, and I had a great time looking back over the drawings he did for each of the stories.

He's not a huge fan of drawing -- he'd much rather write -- so his illustrations are fairly simple and unadorned...but they are super precious.

Keepsakes for sure!

(Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego refusing to bow down and worship the statue)

(Jonah and the big fish)

(Elijah calling down fire from Heaven)

(The plague of the gnats in Egypt)

Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Play-Doh Neurons!

To add a little hands-on pizazz to our two-chapter unit on the brain and the nervous system, our Apologia curriculum suggested we make models of neurons out of clay (we used Play-Doh).

Who knew making larger-than-life replicas of dendrites, axons and myelin sheaths could be so much fun!?