Wordy Wednesday

My dh is healing, he's sore and needs help but he's doing well. We are now doing our lessons since FIL has left and I'm grateful to give the kids something productive to do. It drives me crazy not to do something with them. I didn't realize how much purpose it gives our day, Camille is currently listening to Vivaldi and completing her independent math work.

Science
I am working on book lists, books we own, books we want to own and what age group they are appropriate for. I'm using the topics I put in our Seasonal Science chart to organize the books although we're not going to our nature studies. For an example:

Weather

The Listening Walk
Feel the Wind
On the Same Day in March
Air is All Around You
Usborne First Encyclopedia of Our World
The Cloud Book
Magic School Bus, Inside a Hurricane
The Man Who Named the Clouds
The Storm Book
and so on.

I'm actually not putting them in grade levels but I'm writing down all our titles and I'll put whatever succession of reading I think will be best for my kids. BookMooch is aiding greatly in developing a home library for science. We have a short list of books to purchase after previewing them through the library to make sure we really want them.

THE IDEA
We will work out for ourselves the balance between reading, narrating, illustrating and performing experiments. We'll read about a subject for 60-90 days and then move on. We will be keeping a science notebook, filled with whatever we want at whatever time. It could be coloring pages, illustrations from our reading, narrations, or a map about where we are talking about. I thought about creating unit studies for each book, and making it more academic until I realized that will kill the love of learning. I will follow the kids' lead on this.

Nature Studies
This will consist of backyard projects and nature walks but will be done informally. I'm reading a lot about being a silent teacher during nature walks so I will keep mum and just follow my own interests. If I see a flower I want to draw, I'll draw it. I'm so glad I bought the Handbook of Nature Study, what a multi-layer resource!

Although I can't really put the plan on paper just yet, we're going to read Mother West Wind's How Stories after we finish Mother West Wind's Children by Thornton Burgess. From there, we'll probably read Seed-Babies by Margaret Worley which I printed from online.

That's it. I'm done thinking, planning and scheming for science, it's time to DO. Actually we're still on the planets but we are reading Mother West Wind's Children and doing nature studies. I haven't written about our nature walks because LIFE has been busy. We're doing them, I'm just not writing about them. Hopefully that will change this week.

Boy this is turning into a science blog...sheesh. I'll post about our 3rd grade poems next. Yes, I know which ones they will be.