Where in the World?

We've been sick this week so we haven't done too much....a couple half finished projects and one easy one completed.

Armed with our 3 dinosaur books/encyclopedias, a big tub of plastic dinosaurs and a few maps they went to work. Identifying each unlabeled dinosaur, looking it up in the index of their book and finding out which continent(s) it was discovered on. As you can see by the huge pile, the majority of the dinosaurs we own were discovered right here in North America.

Once they were sorted by continent we began sorting them by time period...

With most being in the Cretaceous:

And the long-necked ones in the Jurassic

We were hard pressed to find a Triassic dinosaur. Cale scoured the book until he found a meat-eating, 2-leg walking, smaller dinosaur that resembled the little green one in the picture that lived in the Triassic. He decided it was a Coelophysis.

Our half finished projects are models of carnivore/herbivore teeth and models of 4 of the different theories of extinction- and we'll get them done next week.

My World: Earth Lapbooks

They are done!! Rylan was a trooper through the continent books and did 90% of the writing, dictating the rest. Originally I was going to make 2 of the same, but as I was creating I realized Cale would not be able to keep up- with the writing and the attention span, so I scaled his down and made a K version.


Mini books in Rylan's version:

• What is a Galaxy
• Solar System: listing the planets in order
• Geography terms pocket. We made a salt dough map and labeled each of the terms. Then we looked them up in the glossary of one of our books and wrote the definitions for the pocket.
• Iside the Earth. We did a little activity with construction paper circles for the different layers of the earth and labeled them
• 7 continent books: Each book contained a map, a world map for him to locate and color the continent, a page to list and color a flag for a few countries, a page on languages, georgraphy and interesting facts.
• World's oceans petal book.
• A label-the-oceans book
• Ocean Facts book
• 4 mini-matchbooks for random US facts
• a TN book: included state flower, bird, nickname, flag, date joined the union, abbreviation...
• Major Marks of the US: Statue of Liberty, Golden Gate, Old Faithful, Washington DC, Mt. Rushmore, and the Grand Canyon
• Map of the US: he drew/colored the Mississippi River, Appalachians, Rockies, TN, Washington DC, Great Lakes then numbered and labeled them on the inside.
• Flag Facts on the US: We made paper flags and discussed the flags nicknames and the meanings of the stars and stripes
• 4 books on some important buildings around the world: The Great Pyramid, The Coliseum, The Eiffel Tower and The Great Wall of China
• 6 books on 'extremes' : The longest river, the tallest building, the oldest moutains, the tallest moutain, the lowest point on earth, the largest volcano
• On the back I made a game board and 3 sets of colored cards: one on geography terms, one on random world fact (biggest continent, which ocean is the largest, which continent includes France, etc...) and US facts. We will be playing it the next few days to help retain all the info they have learned.

Mini books in Cale's version

• Solar System, inside earth, 4 US mini matchbooks, TN facts, label-the-ocean book, US major marks, and labeling the US map and 4 of the 6 'extremes' books were the same as Rylan's
• Wonders of the World. These were the same 4 buildings as Rylan's but his was in a circle book and had no fact writing involved.
• Flag Facts: same as Rylan's except that he had 2 specific questions to answer instead of blank lines to write on.
• World map. The major change was he did a map similar to the US one for the continents. He colored each one and labeled them on the inside. He drew flags as well after his writing- but that was his choice :) I think he could copy flags all day.

Here are the pictures from inside the books:

Hard at Work

We've been hard at work this week. Rylan and Cale have been working through the "My World" lapbook I created, which spans from the Milky Way to TN and everywhere in between, with a focus mostly on geography.

So far this is the most writing intensive lapbook we've done, and they are doing really well with it. I think Rylan is close to the point where writing will stop being work and become something natural- if I could only get him spelling on his own.

Cale is improving. He's been sick with headaches all week, but in the mornings when he is at his best he's done a lot of hard work .