Fun with Books
Pop up books are one of my favorite things of childhood. I still enjoy looking at them as an adult. So when I found these books some time back & they corresponded to work we have been learning about I was excited to scoop them up last Christmas for the girls. The first book is about bugs.
The scorpion is not a bug we’ve talked much about so Lily was particularly interested in this page.
Lily chose the frog life cycle book from the bookshelf prior to looking through the bug book. Following this we happened to come apon a very tired toad that the girls were able to pick up & examine easily. We talked about the parts and that a frog was an amphibian & why. They then put it under a tree carefully & went about their play. To continue with this I’ve added frog work to the shelves for the next two days for them to work on including the book pictured above that Lily likes. I’ll include encyclopedias but ask the girls to bring me the appropriate one to see if they can manage finding their own information.
I love that this book includes a page on classifying insects. We just went through the process of studying the types of animals in the animal kingdom & it was nice to have a fun way of going over the material again. There is also a life cycle page the girls enjoyed.
The interior of the cockroach was interesting for the girls to look at myself included. We usually focus on the outside parts of animals so this was a good introduction to the insides of things with diagrams. It’s a gross bug so they weren’t horrified by it. Lol.
The wasp is also covered which has a similar life cycle to the bee that we’ve learned about.
I love how when the children are interested in learning how they can end up into each others spaces and not bother one another one bit.
One of the other books explored was a dinosaur theme. We’ve touched up on dinosaurs but not to the extent that we’ve studied the types. We’ve discussed prehistoric creatures and the reference of dinosaurs to birds. We’ve talked about extinction & how some animals that aren’t prehistoric also become extinct & for different reasons which brings the idea home as to why they aren’t around anymore despite the different theories. I’ve taken out more dinosaur books to encourage questions and it’s working. When Maggie realized dinosaurs ate each other once apon a time after seeing an illustration- she understood the reasoning why other animals might eat each other today. She is beginning to understand that animals have different worlds than we do even though we live in one world together. That we all require certain things like food and water which is the common element between us.
Adapting Education 