Thursday, June 11, 2009

Insect Study


Since we will be schooling year-round, my plan is to do a fun "theme" each summer. Who knows if I will actually do this, as this is my very first time homeschooling, but it is my plan just the same. So, in light of M's current obsession (actually, it has been his obsession for most of his life), this year's summer theme will be INSECTS!!!

At the top of this post you will see a bunch of insect books, as well as a few activities. First of all, those aren't ALL my books. I did get some from the library. But we do own quite a few insect books (including our new Bug Dictionary, which is a huge hit at our house!). Have I mentioned that I love books? I truly, really LOVE books. I especially love buying children's books. I could spend hours on end at Barnes and Noble. But really my favorite way to buy books is to get a deal. I love my library's semi-annual sale...I love Half-Price Books and I even love a local consignment shop that sales kids toys and books. I have gotten tons of great deals there!

Back to school, because we enjoy doing literature studies so much, we are going to use several picture books as our way to study insects this summer. Here are the books that we will be using:








I found ideas for how to use these books all over the web, but my starting point was http://www.homeschoolshare.com/. This site is fabulous...and best of all, it is FREE! Definitely check it out if you are interested in trying literature-based unit studies. Truman's Aunt Farm is a Five in a Row book, so most everything we do for that book will come from my FIAR manual. And if you Google "insect unit studies" - boy will you be overwhelmed! There is so much information out there. I really had trouble narrowing it down.

As we do each book, I will post and talk about the specific things we are doing. I also hope to post pictures of our Insect Notebook, which we should have completed by the end of summer.

Before I go, I want to mention that I am just learning how to post pics of things in my blog. As you can see, the links for the books above aren't working (when you click on the picture, it should take you directly to that book at Amazon). I am not computer savy and frankly, I am proud of myself for having a blog at all! Hopefully, I will figure this out and fix the links in this post and going forward.

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