If you saw my last post about our 2015-2016 school plans, you will have seen that I plan to use Memoria Press’ Book Of Insects with Rose.
The course is built around a reader compiled of classic stories written by Arabella Buckley and Julia McNair Wright in the late 1800s. I have bought the whole shebang – the reader, the student book & the teacher guide.
Rose is my little nature lover. She loves creatures of all kinds. All kinds from the lowly maggot, through to a majestic elephant, she loves them with all her heart. What she does not love, is writing! So quite possibly the student book will go unused. But that does not bother me too much. Most of her lessons are completed orally at present, and the ones she does write for, there is often much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Over a paragraph. Sigh. However, when she does write, she writes in beautiful cursive, so that has to be something…right..?
Back to the insects. I plan to do a lesson a week from the Memoria Press guide with her. You can see a sample lesson in the above link. The lessons follow the readings in the Arabella Buckley story book & are extremely structured. There are lots of opportunities for sketching, which she should enjoy. One never quite knows with Rose 🙂
I have bought some other things to use for this study:
A Bug Barn which has lots of accessories.
Buzzing! Discover The Poetry In Garden Mini-beasts. The reviews on this little book were smashing, so I could not resist.
RSPB First Book Of Mini-beasts A good, basic field guide to mini beasts in the garden.
I intend to keep an eye out for any other good quality read aloud with insects as a focus – please do let me know if you have any recommendations.
I think the most useful children’s field guides still have to be the Golden Guides–there’s an updated Insects guide from 2001 (we have some of their updated guides, but not this one…and mostly the kids use my old ones), as cheap as $.01, plus shipping (so $4.00 all together) used on Amazon, which is about $3 cheaper than buying new.
But my biggest recommendation (if she really gets into this) is upgrading to a sweep net..the kits like the Discovery one are pretty cool for the short term, but its been my experience that they don’t hold up over time. This guy is pretty classic (also what I used in college, lol) https://www.compleatnaturalist.com/mall/insect_nets.htm
Also, if you have water (stream, pond, etc) access, you can do quite a bit with macroinvertebrates in fresh water (here’s the link to a free printable dichotomous key–another great skill to have, in using one of these guys: http://www.dep.wv.gov/WWE/getinvolved/sos/Documents/MacroID/DichotomousKey.pdf ), any you can easily turn that into a biodiversity in comparison to water quality experiment (something like this school program: http://www.stroudcenter.org/lpn/). There are a number of kits for water quality testing, and there are some really cool things you can do with creating your own mini-wetland with soda bottles to talk about how wetlands and riparian zones filter water http://www.waterwisesb.org/uploadedFiles/sbwater/education/BottleBiology.pdf
^this is the sort of stuff we do in the summer
Have fun!
That is fantastic! Thank you so very very much!
The Memoria Press book looks really good- thank you for mentioning it 🙂
I’ve just ordered my copy of the reader and teacher guide. I’ll probably do most of the lessons orally with my son too, since he also is not a big fan of writing. 🙂 Love the bee-keeper outfit! Rose looks like she’s all ready to go! 🙂
Brilliant! Please do keep in touch!
Gwen, you are welcome. I am planning to use several of their guides this year.