It's time to start planning for January! So, I usually have a unit study going all the time. We do a regular Math Curriculum and have a simple spelling/phonics curriculum. I do unit studies to tie everything together and incorperate science and socials. This year we've done: native studies (very big in P.S. here) Fairy Tales as a genre of literature mapping/ geography Can you think of anything that you think "every grade 1 kid" learns about? Any ideas for our next couple of unit studies?
How about: Weather Early settlers Solar System Knights? One way I got ideas was to look in the Boy Scout handbook (even though I have girls) and get topic ideas to build my studies around. Best wishes! Jill
Actually, they do! When I taught special needs primary, we spent a whole afternoon rolling cars from the preschool class down the hill. We learned that if you started it where it was flat, you had to give it a push. If you actually started it ON the hill (on the paved walk), it would roll all the way down to the bottom. If you started it at the bottom and pushed it UP, it would go a little ways, and then came back down. If you started it at the top in the grass, you had to give it a little push and it wouldn't go very far. That was our science fair activity! I can absolutely see a teacher telling the kids they can design a catapult at home and bring it in, and then have a contest to see which one could throw the farthest, or could land a marble in a cup or something.
Community Helpers- We did a unit in the early years of community jobs. We visited a bakery, the fire department, the library, the newspaper, a florist, and an auto shop.
With my first grader this year, we've done Family and Friends, and will do Community Helpers (occupations), a little study of our state, Famous Americans, maybe holidays, a little geography, and in science, we did the 5 senses, and are currently doing Insects, and will probably do Arachnids/Myriapods, Mammals, Amphibians and Reptiles, Birds, Fish... We may not get to all of it, but hey, there's next year, right? Mostly my "units" consist of read-alouds and coloring pages from coloring books or pages from the internet. Not exactly lapbooking, not exactly notebooking, but nothing wrong with "color-booking"...
We need to do something on magnets, but I don't really know what to do with it. I'm not sure I can make more than a day of it. I am part of a distance learning program here, so I have to meet 80% of the PS learning outcomes. Magnets is on the list. I like the idea of "color-booking', and my kids like natural science. I might be able to do something cool with Knights and medivel times, but we did fairy tales, so we did some on castles already. hmm... I love brainstorming here. It gets my creative juices flowing, and now I have some ideas to start with so I'll be on the go from there.
Maybe you can find some different shapes of magnets to play with, find out what will stick to what, and what won't. Those stick-and-ball magnet building sets come to mind. Also those "make a face" games where you use a magnet to arrange iron filings into hair and facial hair on a drawing under a plastic cover (haven't seen one of those in quite awhile!). There are those rubber magnets by the yard (at WalMart) that have adhesive on the back and you cut to the size you want to make refrigerator magnets. You may have coin-sized magnets in the bottom of your shower curtain... You can use one of the regular magnets to magnetize a sewing needle, then float it in water on a small piece of cork and make a compass - I always thought that was pretty cool, myself. There are magnetized hammers (especially tack hammers) and screwdrivers that can be cool to play with too, if you have any of those. Have your students draw pictures ("journal" or "lab book") of their various magnets and things around the house, with what sticking to what and what repels, and what just doesn't react at all. Making an electo-magnet can take awhile, and is pretty interesting to do. I think you could stretch out all that to a week, by adding some library resources....
Lindina - those magnet ideas sound great. The kids have asked to do Robots first. I have some interesting reading comprehension stuff that has robot themes - just bits and peices from books I already have. I have found some crafts, and library books. DH is going to try to build something with them too. I may the magnet theme after that. It would flow nicely from the robot idea. The symphony here is doing "Peter and the Wolf" for kids in a couple of months, so I'm going to try to do a theme around that. Maybe a trip to the local community music center to talk to someone about the instruments, study some composers, maybe even throw in some geography. Thanks for getting me on the way with this everyone!
Robots sounds cool -- my dgs age 6 wants dh to help him build one. Couldn't find a kit (without having to mailorder) for Christmas, but Rainbow Resource had one in their catalog, so maybe for birthday later... Did find a sort of Erector Set knockoff that builds a truck and a forklift, though.
My science class played with magnets for an hour without even realizing it. (Don't forget to keep the magnets away from electronics!) Lindina has some good ideas once your robotics study is done. You can also graph things- different magnets have different strengths: how much can a stick magnet lift compared to a round magnet, etc. There's a lesson on polarity; the magnetic field of the Earth; uses for magnets; how NASA uses magnets, etc. MT3
The magnet talk made me think of something cool ds and I did a few years back (actually, he would probably find it cool to do again). Feel free to ignore if you have heard of it before. You pick a cereal with the highest iron content (look at the nutririon label for the highest percentage). Put some cereal in a zip top sandwich bag. Crush it with a rolling pin. Then, the fun part is to take your magnet and run it along the bag. In the end, you can visually see the iron in the bag seperate from the cereal. It is pretty crazy to see it and think that you eat it.
