Week Two: Bigger Hearts

Since my last post about week two for Bug's Creation to Christ was so long, I decided to make the week two post for Bigger separate this week.  Let me know if you are liking the two programs posted separately or if I should try to keep them together as one post each week.

This year in Bigger the history emphasis is on America History.  Bean learned more about Christopher Columbus as well as John Cabot. 

During unit one Bean drew this map and added Columbus' first journey across the ocean.  This week we added John Cabot's journey from England to current day Canada, but I forgot to take a picture of that.  Yes, I could go do it now, but I'm feeling lazy.  Sorry, folks.

In science we are learning about the seashore.  The book used is called One Small Square: Seashore.  I must admit, this is not my favorite science book ever.  The book is written as though you are actually able to go explore a seashore multiple times over the course of many days.  That's not exactly a possibility for most people.  Thus, it leaves a lot to the imagination, which just isn't something I expect from a science text.  However, as much as I'm not a fan, Bean seems to enjoy it and she is learning some things from it. It certainly has colorful pictures, which appeal to children.

Here she drew a picture of a bird that lives on the shore and a sand dollar and star fish that live in the area between the tides.  With a lot of extra explanation from me, she does understand the difference between high and low tide, what causes them, how the strand line is made, and what kind of animals live in this area. 

 










She did an experiment to answer the question "How do the beaks that birds have help them get their food?"  For this project, make sure you have some dry oatmeal, rocks, dry beans or peas, a clothespin, pliers, and tweezers on hand.  Her written conclusion sounds vague, but her oral retelling of how they each worked differently was spot on, so I accepted it this time.

Artistic expression tied in with the idea that John Cabot found seas filled with codfish.  Believe it or not, there is an image of a fish in that painting, although you can really only see the top of it in the blue area.  The directions call for the student to lay wax paper on construction paper then etch an image of a fish onto it, thus transferring the wax to the paper.  I read from a couple other bloggers that this just did not work out well, so we just skipped trying that method and instead used a white crayon to draw the fish image, then used watercolor to paint over it.  Same concept, no frustration.

Bean is finally getting into the poetry section of each week.  I think she went into it expecting the writings to be boring or overwhelming, but spending the entire week on one poem to really understand all the words, phrases, and meaning has really been helpful.  By the end of this week, she was saying how much she like the poem.  Although we do recite the poem every day as instructed, I do not put an emphasis on memorizing it each week.  We are already memorizing a Bible verse each week and Bean struggles with memorization as it is.



Oh!!  I almost forgot something very important.  In a previous post I mentioned that I stopped doing Drawn Into the Heart of Reading (DITHOR) mid-book.  While I can still say that abandoning that book (an Amelia Earhart biography) was absolutely the right decision, I have to admit I may have jumped the gun on dropping DITHOR altogether.  After some advice from the people on the Bigger Facebook group (join it already, if you haven't yet!) I spent some time making sure I had a book at the appropriate reading level.

A suggested reading title list is provided with DITHOR, however I was having some difficulty finding a book from that list that was both interesting to Bean and available at my library.  So I visited the Scholastic book website and used their "book wizard" tool to locate biographies at the 2.5 to 3.5 reading level.  Many of these book were indeed at my library.  I had her start reading Abe Lincoln's Hat. She loved it!! The DITHOR pages were suddenly much easier with her better understanding of the book.

We won't complete the biography section of DITHOR since we wasted some time trying to figure out what worked best, but I feel very confident moving forward that this will be a great year of literature study as long as we get books at Bean's level.

On a final note, Sprout really enjoyed getting out all our math manipulative items and playing with them during school time.  She starts preschool next week and she is very excited about that!