catching up on our hawaii study...

Wow... I've been really behind on posting week! We have actually been doing school... I promise! :-)

I went a little crazy now that I can request books online at the library and now we have a big towering stack of books to read!

One we read this week is...

DK Eye Wonders: Ocean
Lots of text but not so much that it overwhelmed us... we were able to get through it in one sitting. However, it did begin to skip the pages about the arctic ocean near the end. The photographs are beautiful! The kids really enjoyed it!

And since I'm rereading my copy of this...

A Charlotte Mason Companion by Karen Andreola
I got out the art supplies (the good colored pencils and paper) and let the kids draw while I read the book to them...



(sorry... when I went to label this drawing, I didn't realize that I had it upside down until I was almost done... so keep that in mind...lol)
I guess the next step is to have them do the labeling... I totally forgot about that... baby steps, baby steps. :-) I thought they did a good job though! They really seemed to enjoy it.

After that we read a fun book I found at the library...Surprising Sharks by Nicola Davies
Fun, fun living book about all kinds of sharks that we'd never heard of before. It also went over the parts of a shark and what makes a shark a shark. I have a feeling that we'll be reading this one again.

Then we worked with our parts of a shark three part cards...


They're a free download here on the MontiMats site.

Yesterday we read this book...
Magic School Bus On the Ocean Floor
I have always had a love/hate relationship with Magic School Bus books. I love how accessible and interesting they make science for kids BUT there is so much going on on every page that it makes me batty trying to read it all. HOWEVER... yesterday that all changed! Clara is now a strong enough reader that she could read most of the extra dialog that's scattered around the pages with Alex! I read the main text and the "reports" and the kids did the dialog. It was really a lot of fun. Woo hoo!

Okay... I think that pretty much catches us up on what we've done beyond our basics so far this week!