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Studying Pandas

This week we wrapped up our study of China with a unit/lapbook on giant pandas from Homeschool Share, using the book Giant Pandas by Gail Gibbons. If you haven’t checked out this great resource, hop on over and visit because there is a little something for most topics you might be studying.

One of the most exciting parts of our week was having two of our monarchs emerge from their chrysalis’. We had both a male and female butterfly, and let both of them go outside. Can you tell if this one is the male or the female?


Our kids love the hands-on part of lapbooking (admittedly they don’t always like to write a bunch of stuff), but love cutting/pasting and they DO love to show them off to everyone. You can see their video explanation of their Panda lapbooks in our panda lapbook post.

To go along with the Giant Panda unit the girls also learned how to draw pandas using Draw Write Now – and I cannot say enough about these books. I even had fun following along and drawing one too (not too shabby, I’m thinking!).


Some great Panda Resources:

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Studying China: Week 2

We’ve wrapped up our tour around China and we’re getting ready to study pandas next week and work on another lapbook together. Here is what we did together this week in our study of China. 

Monday

  • Review from previous week
  • Write our names in Chinese
  • read about Jeanette Li {10 Girls Who Changed History}
  • reviewed Asia geography song {Geography Songs}

Tuesday

  • Talked about the Great Wall of China
  • read about Eric Liddell
  • reviewed Asia geography song
  • Talked about Chinese currency {click on image for pdf file}

Wednesday

  • talked about Mt. Everest
  • read about Hudson Taylor
  • reviewed Asia geography song

Thursday

  • put our goegraphy notebooking pages in our notebook
  • stamped our passports
  • Made egg drop soup
  • reviewed the Asia geography song

Great Links/Resources

Books We Used

Mini Office Lapbook

Welcome to Mini Office 101 (aka “what I’ve been busy putting together this last week”). It’s seriously easy – it just might take a little time on your part, but I promise this is a simple thing to do at night while watching your favorite tv show, or maybe your husband folding laundry. :)

What’s a mini-office, you ask? Essentially it’s a one-stop place for all those essentials that the kids might need while working on their school work. They can prop it up and find quick answers to some of their common questions.

Materials needed:

  • 1-5 office file folders (depends on how big you want it to be)
  • worksheets you’ve printed off or created
  • glue sticks
  • contact paper (I took mine to a local teaching store and had all four I made laminated for around $6).

Putting it all together:

  • Glue your file folders together side by side, overlapping one side of each. Be sure that the folders can still fold up inside each other (i.e. don’t put them together too closely).
  • Print off the worksheets and things that you want to put into your office and place them where you want them. I had one side more focused on reading/writing things and the other one more math/science/geography related.
  • Glue your charts and worksheets in with glue sticks and laminate.

This last week I made three different lapbooks (and one for a friend who is beginning to homeschool this year). Zachary’s Preschool mini office was a fairly simple one that used only one file folder. His “office” has the following information in it:

  • Left/Right hands
  • Shapes
  • Paper money and coins
  • Months of the year
  • Colors and color words
  • Counting to 20 and number words
  • Alphabet chart
  • Short and Long vowels

McKenna and Laurianna’s mini offices used a total of four file folders, glued back to back and it all folds up nicely into the size of one folder. Theirs are fairly similar, differing only on their addition/subtraction or multiplication/division charts and a few language items. Their mini offices include the following:

  • Books of the Old/New Testament
  • Cursive chart
  • Writing checklist
  • Short/long vowels
  • World map and continents/ocean song words
  • Fraction circles
  • Coin and paper currency charts
  • Math symbols & words
  • Number chart: includes roman numerals, ordinal numbers and skip counting by 2’s, 3’s, etc…
  • Telling time along with time words
  • “Gallon Man” – cups, pints, quarts, gallon
  • Thermometer
  • Punctuation
  • Story words: beginning, middle, and ending examples
  • Numbers words in English and Spanish
  • Number chart to 100
  • Shapes, colors, days of week, months, US map

If you would like to make you own mini office, I’ve included some great links to various sites where you can download some worksheets to use in your own mini office. I created a few worksheets of my own and they are available as a pdf file to download them for your own use.

Coin chart Left/Right Hands Busy Teachers Cafe a little bit of everthing

K2 Printibles

Reagan Kinderbears Books of the Bible

Squidoo – links and more picture of other mini-offices.

 

Easter Egg Activities


We’ve worked on our Easter Egg Lapbook this week and we’ve had such a great time with it. The girls were fascinated looking at Faberge eggs – and we had to see a picture of every.single.one. No small feat, when there were 68 made. Granted a few are missing – but still! We talked about Russia (since Faberge eggs were made there), learned about the parts of an egg, found out chickens have ear lobes – if you don’t believe me…better do a little research! It’s true!

Zachary joined us in coloring some eggs. We used some of the hard boiled eggs for experiments too. Do you think a raw egg or a hard boiled egg spins faster? Try it out!! We also soaked a hard-boiled egg in vinegar to see what would happen (other than it getting stinky, that is).

The girls LOVED estimating how many jelly beans they had in their bags….sorting and graphing them by colors, counting them out…and then getting to eat some too (and who can blame them, right?).

We are going to put all the lapbook pieces together on Monday, but at least they have now been finished. I’ll post them with their completed books soon!

Legend of the Easter Egg

Our girls loved The Legend of the Candy Cane so much that I decided to create a unit study and lapbook for The Legend of the Easter Egg. If you are interested in doing the unit yourself, you can go to Homeschool Share and download all of the mini-books and unit there by following this link. Everything is there in one nice location. :)

Some things that we’ll be studying in the unit include:

  • The anatomy of an egg
  • Science experiments
  • Faberge Eggs
  • Geography: Russia (Faberge from here)
  • Why chicken eggs are different colors
  • Sequencing
  • Similes
  • Vocabulary
  • Time
  • Symbolism of Easter egg
  • Celebrations of Easter (Good Friday and Easter Sunday)
  • Poetry
  • Communion
  • Weather: Freezing rain and hail

Here are a few pictures of my lapbook that I tested out first. :) There were too many pieces to have it in just one folder, so it ended up being a double lapbook.

 

 

President’s Day is done….


…at least on paper in our house it’s done! :) Yes, I know President’s Day isn’t until next Monday, but we finished the lapbook ahead of time and now we are spending time reviewing the things that we’ve talked about. Laurianna is already excited to move onto the next lapbook – and can’t decide what to do (what a problem, huh?). Should it be Little House in the Big Woods or Flat Stanley. I think I’m leaning toward the latter….

For this lapbook we actually glued two file folders together and then added in our mini-books. In this one we covered quite the range of topics: the Presidential seal, our current President, what all happens on President’s Day, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, vocabulary, made a log cabin…the list goes on. Definitely enough to fill two books up! Here are our pictures (which Laurianna was more than happy to model for you!).

In case you are wondering, I got several of the lapbook pieces through Homeschool Share and a few activities through Enchanted Learning, and some I just put together on my own, like the joke section (because the girls just love jokes!!), vocabulary, presidential seal info, etc… I just used some blank templates.