New to board and looking for curriculum on animals

[Guest momtomygirls]

Hi I am new to the WTM boards, but not homeschooling. I am trying to decide on what curriculum to use with my almost 6yr old dd. She wants to do something on animals. I am looking for some choices other than WP. A few notes about her. She is exceptionally bright, but is not reading yet. But she does like to right, She was in a charter school for part of this year and scored high on their intelligence test for the high ability program. We were homeschooling and she just did not want to learn to read. So I decided to try the charter school that her sister was going to. We have since moved back to SC and are homeschooling both of them again. She knows some of her letters and sounds but not all of them.

 

Anyway, she says wants to study animals. I did WP's animal worlds with her sister a couple of years ago. I would like to know what other options there at for her age level to study animals. I am going to try Happy Phonics with her and Making Math Meaningful. I am also considering doing HOD.

 

Her sister is going to use CLE LA and reading, TT math, American Girls history/lit and maybe God's design science. She is going to be 10 in the fall and there is 3 1/2 yrs between them. I also have a dd that will be 4 in the Fall.

 

Brandie in SC

[Guest momtomygirls]

:001_smile:

[rafiki]

.

[Osaubi]

If your family likes unit studies or lapbooks you could try http://www.homeschoolshare.com . My kids like reading the same book everyday, but you don't have to if your dd doesn't like it.

 

My dd3 is bright, and I had to find something that would keep her interest. She loved Hello Ocean, Harry the Dirty Dog, and Feathers For Lunch. She really likes any lapbook that Robin Diedrichs does.

 

HTH

[ElizabethB]

My daughter really loves animals, too. We mostly just check out a bunch of library books, they have 2 whole shelves full at just our small branch, it seems to be a favorite of many other children, too!

 

I recently bought "The Peterson Field Guide Color In Books, Mammals," we've really enjoyed it. I have a biology degree and I learned a few things about some of the more obscure animals! It has some stickers, too. The amount of text is just right for a K - 3rd grader to listen to as they're coloring. We'll probably buy more when we finish this one.

 

For phonics, I highly recommend the "Talking Letter Factory" for learning letter names and sounds. They have a lot of repetition packed into 30 minutes, and it's very cute. I also have a fun phonics game on my website to use with whatever you use to teach her to read. Here are my suggestions for teaching a beginning student to read, I link to the phonics concentration game there: http://www.thephonicspage.org/On%20Reading/newstudents.html

 

We are currently growing moths in our butterfly habitat, and have ordered caterpillars that will turn into butterflies. We also have fun catching the local creatures, my daughter caught a frog today and we kept him in our frog habitat for a while. (We have a catch and release program. They can keep lizards and frogs until night, then they must be released to go home to their friends and family!) We read up about everything we catch. Right now our Eastern Fence Lizards are doing push-ups to show off their blue bellies and try to attract female lizards. (My mom accused my husband of trying to make our lizards do push-ups because he is in the military. We were sure to tell her the real reason when we started homeschool and found out!)

Edited April 26, 2009 by ElizabethB

[Wendy Inman]

We used Evan-Moor's ScienceWorks books - Animals with Backbones and Animals without Backbones along with Usborne First encyclopedia of Animals as spine. We also did a couple of free lapbooks from Homeschoolshare and raised butterflies :)

[ChicoryChick]

Hello,

 

LHFHG in HOD has read alouds from the Thornton Burgess books as well learning about some animals in their science (We just did a little blurb on cats this week). It would be easy to add an animal study to Little Hearts.

[Guest momtomygirls]

thanks for the ideas. Besides WP is their any curriculum specifically on animals?

[Mandy in TN]

Isn't MFW K mostly animal themed?

HTH-

Mandy

[MommyInTraining]

Can I ask you why you don't want to do AW from WP?

 

I also have an animal lover and have been thinking about using it with me soon to be 6 year old girl.

 

MFW K is not mostly animals. It is science based with some animals, but I wouldn't consider it an animal curriculum like AW.

 

Thanks!

[Mandy in TN]

MFW K is not mostly animals. It is science based with some animals, but I wouldn't consider it an animal curriculum like AW.

:( Sorry, I tried. I don't know of anything else. We used and loved WP AW.

Mandy

[Mandy in TN]

http://www.thejubileeacademy.org/articles/animals_homeschooling_printables.html

 

Not a curriculum, but when I googled this is a page I pulled up.

Mandy

[MommyInTraining]

Here is a link to the MFW K themes.

 

http://www.mfwbooks.com/k_theme.htm

 

As I looked at it, it actually DOES study a lot of animals. I guess after looking at AW, it just didn't seem as animal focused to me. We did use MFW K and it was a sweet program, but I didn't use it with my animal lover. Sorry for the misinformation :blush:.

[Kate in Arabia]

I have done animal studies following the WTM recommendations, and it has been a huge hit. We used an animal encyclopedia as our spine, and lots of Zoobooks. I think the Zoobooks are fantastic for the photos, and sometimes they have activity sheets inside. We also used Enchanted Learning to get coloring pages and diagrams for the animals we were studying.

 

I really have not found it hard to put together...

 

hth!

[TN Mama]

I have done animal studies following the WTM recommendations, and it has been a huge hit. We used an animal encyclopedia as our spine, and lots of Zoobooks. I think the Zoobooks are fantastic for the photos, and sometimes they have activity sheets inside. We also used Enchanted Learning to get coloring pages and diagrams for the animals we were studying.

 

I really have not found it hard to put together...

 

hth!

 

This is what we've done this year and it has been a huge hit. We used library books & Zoobooks as well as National Geographic for Kids online and several other resources. There is a ton of information available. I found a free lapbook for zebra week, and we watched videos online. We've had lots of fun with our Science study this year.

[Closeacademy]

I really like the animal lapbooks over at http://www.homeschoolshare.com/what'snew.php. There are different lapbooks on individual animals as well as things like just fish or birds or whatever.

 

We like them because you can go deep and have the child do lots of research or you can just read some books together and easily put the lapbook together.

 

Just an idea on doing something a little different.:001_smile:

[MommyInTraining]

I do have the MFW K TM for sale if you are interested ;)!

[kalanamak]

This is a fabulous book, and look at the used price. Many pages, great art, maps of the world for each animal and a size comparison with a human (my son loved this when just 6). The book is very big, and this allows you to sit right next to kiddo and look at it. It lays flat, too.

 

http://www.amazon.com/Complete-Guide-Animals-Jinny-Johnson/dp/1845660943/ref=sr_1_14?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1241009976&sr=1-14

 

We would meander slowly, and this plus Life of Birds, Life in the Undergrowth, Life in the Freeze, Life of Mammals, Trials of Life and Life in Cold Blood have been really good for us. Kiddo can recognize all kinds of birds as belonging to a certain type, even if he has not seen the animal before.

[nova mama]

... what about Kingfisher's First Animal Encyclopedia, recommended by WTM as a spine? After you read the entry to her, she can narrate, answer your questions, etc., while you write. SWB talks about narration lessons with science on pp. 159-166 (not the new edition).

 

Best wishes!

[nova mama]

duplicate

Edited April 29, 2009 by nova mama
Deleted duplicate

[maryanne]

Living Learning Books (LLB) Level One is about plants, animals and the human body, It studies 12 different animals over 20 weeks and those weeks could be stretched to fill nearly a school year if you have access to a good library. To me the best part about this curriculum is the great lists of books, both interesting nonfiction and fun, but relevant fiction. We found a lot of really great books in their lists. If you don't have good library access it would probably wouldn't work out so well because you'd have to buy a lot of books. It also includes video lists, internet links, project/experiment instructions and some coloring pages.

 

I also heartily second the recommendation for Zoobooks. We added in Zoobooks for animals not included in LLB to stretch to curriculum out by several weeks. They include great, colorful, informative write ups about the animals, sometimes project/experiment ideas, and some puzzles and games that relate.

 

Maryanne

ds-almost 9

dd-6

[sagira]

You could do six weeks on each of these topics:

 

Group B- Other Animals

Group B1- Insects (online now!)

Group B2- Mammals

Group B3- Fish

Group B4- Amphibians

Group B5- Reptiles

Group B6- Invertebrates

 

and get your field guides, go out for nature walks and sketch those animals, jot down notes in a personal nature journal, read living books on the subject and use both Handbook of Nature Study and Readers Digest's North American Wildlife as your spines. As readers there are Christian Liberty's Nature readers (at least), and you can use Thornton Burgess' books as read-alouds.

[3byzaz]

God's Design has a book only on Animals in their Life Series. It wouldn't take very long, but you could supplement on it, I suppose.