Livening up TWTM science first grade?

[Jayne J]

I'm planning to follow TWTMs science progression this coming year, starting my ds in first grade and doing animals, human biology, then plants, as recommended (in the OLD version!!:)).

The concern I have is about the first 20 wks of animal studies we are planning to do--my ds loves animals, and I have read him books about various types of animals for years now--we've pretty much read the entire library section on animals. So, I wonder if 20 more weeks of reading about animals and doing narration pages is going to hold his attention and/or serve much purpose.

What have you done to enliven the animal study weeks of 1st grade? (we already do nature study and plan to continue it) Do you have a great resource for projects, experiments etc? I want to do butterflies and frogs in the spring and watch them change, but after that, I'm fresh out of fun ideas...

Thanks!

[Kate in Arabia]

Well, I will say we never did narrations for our animal studies. Instead my kids made booklets. We cut out pictures, I got diagrams from Enchanted Learning for them to fill out the anatomy, and I printed pictures of life cycles and they'd put them in order. In their booklets they glued their pictures and diagrams, wrote labels, put stickers, drew pictures, whatever interested them. I found that once I established a routine the books came together really easily. Then we would read whatever books/magazines we had for the animal, and I would look on YouTube for a related video/cartoon.

[2_girls_mommy]

We had kind of the same problem this year as we covered so many animals in K. But we started with the Kingfisher Encyclopedia and learned about Classification. That was something new. She was somewhat familiar w/it, but we went more in depth w/that. We also dumped out their huge tiny plastic animal collection and divided them up into the different groups. They enjoyed that. We did continue to do some animal reports, but we did not do the whole 20 weeks. Things picked up for us when we went to the Human Body study which was all new for her. We just did that longer than the 10 suggested weeks. We used the Usborne Internet linked encyclopedia for online games after we read books about a topic and that was something fun they looked forward to. I wish I had had an Usborne internet linked encyclopedia on animals the first half of the year. If one exists, that might give you something fun to add....

[Jayne J]

Sounds like this is fairly common! I love the book idea--ds would have lots of fun making his own library of animal books!

I do want to start with classification, but we did not purchase the Kingfisher book, because I figured we had a bazillion animal books at home already, plus a well-loved library section. Is it worth it just for the classification info, or is there something else out there that people liked for teaching classification? Great idea about grouping the plastic animals!

Edited May 26, 2009 by urpedonmommy
um, yeah, I can spell...

[Kate in Arabia]

is there something else out there that people liked for teaching classification?

 

I just posted what we did on another thread, I'll repeat below:

 

 

 

What we did this year was to make a wall display. We made plastic pockets for each of the major phyla, and put 3-4 words on each listing its distinctive characteristics. Then as we learned about an animal, ds 7 would make a small booklet with its picture on the front and he would put the booklet in the appropriate pocket; I had also considered printing out larger pictures of each animal and laminating them, then have ds put those in the right pockets as a kind of game, but ended up not going that route.

 

I did something similar with my older ds when he was in 1st grade. In both cases, I felt like it helped them see the relationship between animals and their phyla; also having it on the wall for a more extended period of time seemed to work well.

 

We also did this classification activity, which my ds 7 really enjoyed:

 

http://www.nps.gov/invspcurr/Alien%2...0Imaginary.pdf

[2_girls_mommy]

For us, I did not purchase this. I checked it out from the library for the classification week. For our subsequent animal studies we read library books and went with the seasons (spiders and owls in October, Reindeer in December, hamsters when we got a pet hamster, etc.)

 

I did forget to say that we introduced some studying of different animal habitats as well since my dd was pretty familiar with the animals and characteristics. We used a Magic Schoolbus book on habitats and read from various sources.

[Jayne J]

Thank you for the great ideas and resources! I can see our science year getting more interesting by the minute ( and I'm not stretching the hs budget too much further buying science programs and kits like I feared I might. You are saving me from myself!!;):D)

Keep them coming please!!

[Pata]

We did it by adding experiments from the Janice Van Cleave books which I got from the library. Also, for our notebook I had her color pictures of the animals that she was narrating. We also did several projects over the course of the twenty weeks. You can see my plans here; there are also pictures of what our notebook looked like. Sorry for mentioning something that costs, but it is cheap :D!

[Linda (Australia)]

I'd just like to point that that children actually love doing the read and narrate idea! As parents, we tend to want to liven things up a little too much at times. The idea of narrating about animals sits perfectly at the grade 1 level - many children (and not all, of course!), love reading and narrating, over and over again - repeating the same action day after day. They simply like the routine, and knowing what is expected of them.

 

This is how they learn in this stage, the 'grammar' stage. Too often, we parents want to jump into the 'more interesting' things, such as classification - but keep in mind that this is actually a 'logic-stage' activity. Now sure, some children will love such activities, but for others, jumping in too soon can lead to frustration.

 

We used the Kingfisher Encyclopedia - copying and narrating the information. But, because 'I' thought it was a little dry and boring, we moved onto more 'interesting' things - but you know, my children, two years later, comment how much they loved it when we were using nothing else but the Kingfisher Encyclopedia! They still have their notebooks, and still remember that simple activity.

[Kristiana]

We used the free animal and ocean wall murals from Learningpage.com. Not every animal we wanted to study was included in their cutouts, but my boys loved coloring and cutting out animals to add to the mural. We had a very colorful kitchen by the end!