Even though my second child was born in February, since January, my four-year-old and I have done a fair amount of “school at home,” which my son regularly asks for because he simply loves to learn. I hope that his interest continues because I’ve enjoyed learning with him.
I discovered a fantastic series by Lerner called Early Bird Earth Science. I checked out a number of them on a whim and my son was most interested in Uncovering Earth’s Crust by Conrad Storad (2007). I loved how this volume, which is geared for second to fourth-graders, brought the facts of the earth (from plates to earthquakes to volcanos) into focus in just 44 pages.
The writing was a bit too advanced for my son (of course), and with four chapters, we had to split it up into a few days of reading, but overall he enjoyed the book. I was quite impressed with the clarity I had after reading the book, and the series provides a glossary, with a word bank at the beginning as well, and many pictures and charts to supplement the text.
My son was very interested in the information, but he had a hard time retaining it from day to day. I also was quite burned out from “school time” because of my newborn’s arrival, so we needed to do something different and fun for “school time.” Using the book as a reference, together we created a board game, with questions to answer in order to move forward and volcanoes and earthquakes to slow us down on our way. My son helped me decide which questions to create, he found the pictures in the book that he liked (and I found similar ones online to print for our game board) and we made the board game together. We made it an “open book” game so he could look in the book to find the answers.
We played The Earth Game constantly in the first weeks of my daughter’s life! We’ve since returned the book to the library, and yet my son still wants to play. Now, of course, he no longer needs the book because he remembers what a volcano and earthquake, etc., are.
So I haven’t been blogging and I haven’t been reading many adult books, but I’m sure getting plenty of kids’ books time in these days!
