We have been studying the continents in geography and centered around North America first. We have been using all sorts of things to learn about North America, Louisiana, and Mississippi (where we are centering on right now). The girls enjoy zooming in to their street address on google earth and seeing images of their street in photography. Then they can easily zoom out seeing where their placement is in the state and the continent. They get a good idea of the relationship between miles and the oceans in between the other places in the world they study. So google earth has been a favorite the past week or so. After zooming out of our planet the kids are then left with an image of just the earth at a distance. We then use another program on the ipad that has amazing graphics (I’ll find out the name and insert here later-it’s a new one), and we find the earth in the solar system there and it shows the mass of things that surround us as we revolve in our solar system and just how little we are in relationship to the rest of the universe. These discussions came up right around the newly photographed black hole so it was a perfect time to go over these lessons. We also used books to work on geography and the encyclopedias. I found a few videos on Louisiana and Mississippi and the girls enjoyed watching those as well.
We visited the Aquarium about two weeks back to learn about fish, so yesterday we went to the zoo and enjoyed learning about animals. The next time we go back I will have reviewed the map and we will have worked on some facts about each animal that we have seen already and the few we missed….so we will add our next visit back to our lessons.
Some work completed today was reading with Hooked on Phonics books and workbooks as we make our way through the set and we read through some Bob Books. The girls worked on spelling words with the montessori moveable alphabet and Lily enjoyed reading Dick and Jane Books while Maggie worked on a spelling workbook.