My awesome cousin Kim did "summer units" last year and since she is about the coolest Mom I know I've made her idea my summer project.
The gist of it is pick one theme for the week and spent a little time every day learning about the theme. The activities can be as small as coloring a picture on the topic or as big as a huge trip to a museum or even a beach vacation. It keeps the kids in learning mode and more importantly it keeps me from falling into "summer mode" where we just go to the pool come home, watch TV and do laundry then go back to the pool, come home, have dinner and go to bed.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with having a "chill" summer like that but I really want to be more proactive and do something sort of special.
Here are the units I've picked out:
Week of 5/28: Time/Calendar
Week of 6/3: All about Dad (his birthday is this week)
Week of 6/10: All about Mom (my birthday is this week)
6/17: Music
6/24 Dinosaurs (visit to the NC Museum of Natural Science one day this week)
7/1 USA
7/8 Plants/Life cycle (we should be ready to harvest some veggies from our garden by now)
7/15 Mexico (Drew will be at the Mexico dig site this week)
7/22 Money
7/29 The Beach (tentative week at the beach. We'll see)
8/5 Weather
8/12 Bugs
8/19 Electricity
8/26 Back to school
If you have any unit suggestions or activity ideas or links please comment! I need all the ideas I can get.
THIS IS AWESOME! And, being obsessed with reading as I am, my suggestion is to search your library catalog for a few books on each topic for reading time. I will suggest Gabe's favorite book for your week of 7/8: "Planting A Rainbow" by Lois Elhert. She has another one that may be more appropriate now that I think of it: "Growing Vegetable Soup" I think it is called. Perfect for vegetable gardening! You could draw/print small pairs of pictures about your topic and make a matching game. On weather week, y'all could make a tornado in a jar - you can google instructions on that. On that first week, you could establish a big old calendar in the house and move a marker each day so they get used to seeing time progress. Maybe have calendar time at breakfast like they do at school where you say the day of the week, the day of the month, like that.
ReplyDeleteI think it is apparent I'm excited.