This year we've been using Beautiful Feet which uses lots of historical picture books by Ingri and Pierre D'Aulaire. The books are great, but there just aren't a whole lot of activities and kids at this age really need to do! Recently I finally decided to list all the topics and cover them on my own.
We're studying Benjamin Franklin right now and his time period and I found a book I want to work through with them. The whole thing! It's so great. It's called Amazing Ben Franklin Inventions You Can Build Yourself. Contrary to what the title implies though, there is much more to the book than inventions of his. There are vocabulary words, historical information surrounding his life and the time period and things to make from the same time period. I really like the layout and the tone of the text too. Today we read the chapter about paper money. We only got the book from the library yesterday and I had been perusing it today to pick for today, so I wasn't as prepared as I'll be in the future with materials. We could have made our own paper money but were missing one thing. Instead, we did the other activity and made invisible ink which we used on the girls' own money they made. I had Heidi copy vocabulary words and Autumn wrote her own as I read the chapter. Afterwards I had Autumn write a letter to the president telling him why she thought a historical figure of her choice should be chosen to be on paper currency. She chose Nephi and felt he deserved that distinction because he killed Laban and was brave. Oh, how I love this girl! That was her writing for the day, which was a happy thing for both of us. She enjoyed writing it. Big step.
I also gave them some money to look at and hold while I read. Then we made our bills and used our invisible ink to add watermarks. It was great! Apparently there's a whole "you can build yourself" series. The recommended ages of most of the books are 9-12 and 6-9. But I think that even the 9-12 books will work since they're meant for the kids to do "on their own" and I want to use it to do WITH them. Here's the link to their catalog if you'd like to look at it. http://www.nomadpress.net/
I'm hoping most, if not all, of these will be available from the library so that I can look them over before deciding if this would work. But initially, I'm thinking about doing the books in chronological order next year. Maybe with something like Hillyer's A Child's History of the World as the backbone. And since we're studying Apologia Astronomy for science this year
, I found one of the solar system books Nomad Press offers here at my library and have requested it to see if it has anything I'd like to use to supplement.
This week in Astronomy we're studying the moon. Today we talked about how the moon has less gravity than the earth. We learned that Autumn would weigh 9 lbs on the moon and I would weigh about 20 lbs on the moon. In a flash of inspiration, I handed Autumn two 5-lb bags of flour to show her about what she would weigh. Then I asked Autumn and Heidi to try to pick me up. After they tried, I had them fill a grocery bag with four 5-lb bags of flour and pick it up together. They also each took a turn picking it up and we noted how high they would be able to pick ME up on the moon. Lots of fun!
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