Fox Unit Study

It’s Fox Week here at Homeschooling in the Rose Garden!!

Today started out with a storybook study/nature study on the wild red fox.  I base it on this book by Shirley Woods:

This story is amazing!  In fact, I would highly recommend any of Shirley Woods naturalist series.  I have all of them and we will be spending most of our time going through these for our storybook and nature studies this year along with Trickle Creeks, Ecojournals.  If you enjoy nature study and Charlotte Mason these are the books to get!

We are pairing these two wonderful resources with a few Homeschool Share Lapbook materials.  I pick and choose what I use with this to what would help my children specifically.  Slowly, throughout the book, we can fill out different portions of the lapbook with answers.  For example, the first three chapters we covered several varieties of prey that foxes hunt, two different dens that foxes use and live in, and two different types of barks that foxes will use to warn young and mates.  This gave us information for a whole section of the Lapbook and we hadn’t even gotten half way through the book!

Fox Lapbook from Homeschool Share

Here are some videos we found very useful and fun for our Fox study:

Fox Sounds:

5 Wild Fox Kits Playing:

Aesop's Fables about teasing.  Aesop's Fable Lapbook (we only used the Fox and the Stork portion).

Aesop's Fables - The Fox and The Stork:

And the last one, just for fun, Foxes jumping on a back yard trampoline!

And that’s just for starters.

5th Grade Praying Mantis Lapbook

Cyan’s Praying Mantis Lapbook has several pages added.  I used this story starter page and these worksheet pages from ABCteach.com, and then a few pages from Homeschool Bin. 

I simply stapled the pages to the center portion of the lapbook so they worked like a flip up book.

She also made this: Praying Mantis Cutout (remember to print on cardstock!)

Under the pages she had tons of mini books with information on them. 

She did nearly all of the mini books from the HomeschoolShare.com Praying Mantis Animal Study Lapbook.

She also added some pictures and captions from our own mantis hatching experience. 

My favorite part of this lapbook was a few days after it was done.  I have a few friends that we gave baby mantis to when we had ours… one of them asked if Cyan could help her kids do a lapbook that was similar.  She was able to tell them ALL about mantis, their lifecycle, what they eat, their body structure.  It was cool to hear how much she retained from doing this project!  That is my favorite part of unit studies… the kids retain SO much!

Praying Mantis Preschool Lapbook

The preschool version was simple yet every time he looks at it he can tell me all sorts of neat things about the mantis.  Here is a walkthrough of his lapbook:

This is the outside of the lapbook. All of these resources were found at HomeschoolShare.com under ‘Praying Mantis Animal Lapbook’.

When opened it has pictures from our hatching mantis babies and Logan’s captions which I wrote out under each picture.

The flap in this section has the largest and the smallest mantis fold out.

This section holds the most fold outs.  The anatomy of a mantis, complete with all sections of an insect which goes along with this song:  (To the tune of BINGO)

I am an insect in my life,

and this is what I look like,

two antennae, compound eyes,

one, two, three, four, five, six legs,

Thorax and an abdomen,

and this is what I look like!

The other flaps are what mantis eat, where mantis live,

and the life cycle of a mantis.  (All dictated by Logan, but written by me.)

THe other side has two flaps that are simply named “Fun Facts” and Logan got to add whatever he wanted in there.  We had just watched Kung Fu Panda and the video from here so this is what I got for the first one:

Lol!

Next up is Cyan’s lapbook for the mantis (5th grade) which is much more detailed, but this one was just a lot of fun!

How I use tools like lapbooks and worksheets

Over the last few years I have learned that we are primarily a unit study family.  I have found it easy over the years to teach everything around what the child is interested in at the time in one obsessive month - ahem - ‘unit study’.  I like following the children’s interest and then making their studies center around that interest until the interest runs out. I have tried various curriculum’s over my years as a homeschooler and have basically decided that a curriculum is a backbone in which to play with… not a strict guideline.  I take what I want, add what I want, and then leave the rest. 

I wanted to show you how I use Lapbooks and Curriculum to make the kids Interest Notebooks.

This is Cyan’s Animal Science Notebook.  Our backbone is Winter’s Promise Animal Habitats curriculum and Homeschool Shares Animal Lapbook pages.  Everything (pretty much) stems from there.  I don’t follow a dated guideline… for example, this year we started at the end.  We were going to the beach and Cyan was currently obsessed with the beach. So we started our year with a beach study… which happens to be the very last unit study in the Winter’s Promise curriculum.

This is what that looks like:

This starts off our Ocean “Lapbook” pages.  I punched two pieces of cardstock and placed them in her notebook to start off her unit study.  Then I had her pick a post card when we were actually at the ocean to decorate the front of her lapbook section.  After that I used the lapbook idea of minibooks to bring some interest to these pages and some variety to Cyan’s daily work.

I printed minibooks about sharks, albatross, and sea stars.  As she was studying these creatures she would fill out the lapbooks minibooks and paste them inside her lapbook pages.

This section is just filled with fun factiods she discovered from trips to the aquarium, our beach trips, and her readings tucked inside neat little minibooks!

The second section is her World’s Oceans Montessori Nomenclature cards.  I had Cyan sew this pocket set on the sewing machine.  It was super simple and a fun way to store the cards in her notebook. 

This particular set of cards were from ETC Press Inc eductaional materials. It was in the free section. The control cards are the worlds oceans in words and images so the kids can correct their match ups themselves.  The holder keeps all of the cards nicely together.

The next section in the notebook is mostly the pages that she works through from Winter’s Promise. 

The various reproducible pages have so much variety that we can use them for whatever we want.  At one point she really loved reading about dolphins.  So I copied the blank Animal page and she wrote up a page about what she loved about dolphins and put it in her notebook. 

Another time we spent a week at a beach house and I was able to give her a page and print outs of pictures from the trip that she could use to talk about what she saw next to the ocean.

By the end of the year, she will have an accurate representation of her studies this year.  She gets to see how much better her handwriting has gotten, and what types of trips we took…. right next to finding out cool facts about the animals and places she is studying.

The next section of the notebook is where she is working on now.  She has been very interested in harvesting and hunting this year.  She has even expressed an interest in fishing.  For my sweet, nature loving girly this has been an interesting turn of events… and has started a unit study on deer and the Woods.  And for that unit study, we have two pieces of cardstock in her Interest Notebook ready to be filled with lapbook facts, and the three rings after it with neat worksheets… one after the other.

I have started using this general plan for each of the kids.  Years past I have always taken their best work and put it in a notebook for them to look through at years end, and I am sure that something like that will still happen… but I am guessing that most of it will be in this one large notebook they work on all year.