Gardening Unit Study

I have wanted to try my hand at gardening for a couple of years now. But the poor soil in my yard has been a deterrent. However, I recently started doing a lot of research on container gardening. It doesn't seem as difficult as trying to grow food in the ground. So I am going to give it a try.

I want to involve the children as much as possible. So, it just seems right to incorporate gardening into our homeschool.  Currently we are still going through our agriculture study. So, gardening will fit right in.

Below are the free educational resources that I was able to find online. There is actually a lot of good material available on gardening. Praise God! I told the children that we will be purchasing our soil and necessary materials this weekend. And then we will begin our unit on gardening using the resources listed. I hope you find them useful as well.

Coloring and Activity Books
5 a Day the Preschool Way
Do You Know Where Fruits and Vegetables Come From?
Food Fun
Gardening is Great
Growing Gardeners
Meet the Bean: Soybeans are Everywhere
Old Orchard
Organic Farming w/ Lily the Ladybug
Spuddy Buddy


Educator Guides w/ some Activities Included
Awesome Agriculture: Soybeans
Organization of Living Things study
Pondering Plants
Seeds We Eat
Spring 

A Complete Unit Study
While searching for coloring books on gardening I came across a great unit study called Seeds, by Gwendolyn Nicodemus. I think my children are too young to benefit from it this year. But it will definitely come in handy if we repeat the study in a few years.

The Plan
This is the part where I map out how I plan on using the above free resources. In an ideal life, I would just refer back to this once I start the lesson and follow the plan and have a smooth homeschooling experience. But over the years I have learned that all plans are just that - plans. I have found out (the hard way) to be flexible and to be willing to shorten, lengthen, or skip material - depending on what's working at the time. But I still like to map things out anyway so that I don't go into a new study unprepared.

I am going to print out pages 3,5, and 7 from the 5 a Day book on card stock and put them on the wall as posters. I'll do that before we begin our garden unit study. Then I'll introduce the lesson with Gardening is Great and use this copywork* with it.Organic Farming is an excellent reading book; so, we'll do that next. Here are parts 1, 2, and 3 of the copywork for that - in case it takes a few days to get through the reading. Then we'll move on to Meet the Bean. This activity book does a good job of explaining how seeds grow and there are several hands on activities that look like they will be fun to try. Here is the Bean copywork - 1 and 2.

Once our container garden actually starts to grow we will do as many activities as possible from Pondering Plants. And I'll finish up with Growing Gardeners to help review some of what we have learned.

*The copywork needs to printed out on the landscape setting of your printer.

Milk And Dairy Mini Unit Study

Milk Coloring and Activity Books
How We Get Our Milk 
Milk Matters with Buddy Brush
Polly Pride's Activity and Coloring Book

Where are the Milk Group Foods activity page
The Yummy Fun Book of Low Fat Milk

Valentine's Cards in Homeschool?

We have never celebrated Valelntine's Day in our homeschool. I'm not against doing that, but it never really seemed like something that we needed to do. And none of the children ever requested that we did.

But I have been contemplating whether or not to exchange Valentine's cards this year. I think it would be fun to have the children each make a card and then they could exchange them. The only thing is that I am pretty sure that with 3 boys I will get a couple of "that's for girls" statements. But I'm sure GG would really enjoy making anything that is pink or purple with hearts on it. LOL.

I still have until February 14th to figure it out. I think I'll see how the tone of school is going that day and then I'll decide if that's something that we might pursue. I think that the main thing is that I encourage the children daily to demonstrate the love of Christ. That is love 365 days a year. As long as we keep Him as our focus then I don't think it really matters one way or other if we celebrate a day of love once a year.


If you are planning on celebrating Valentine's Day in your homeschool then you may find this list of printable Valentine cards for kids helpful.

Martin Luther King Jr. Book Online

Yesterday I told the children that we would be off from school today because of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. And my 6 year old turned to me and said, who's Dr. Martin Luther King? I told him we would talk about it the next day and this morning I woke up early and scrambled to find a Martin Luther King Jr. book online.

I remembered finding one from scholastic a few years back when my oldest first learned about the great civil rights leader. I searched unsuccessfully to find that one. But, I am happy to report that Scholastic has another Martin Luther King Jr Book Online that is free.

The book is for grades K-4. It's a little over 20 pages but it is has just enough information to introduce little ones to Dr. King. It looks like you have to be a subscriber to print the book out the way it was intended to look. But you can view a full screen version for free and read the book directly from your screen. That is what I did with the children. They found the book very interesting and asked me a lot of questions afterward.

Eventually, I did find the book that I was looking for. It's called Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Dream. However, it appears that it is no longer free. You now have to have a subscription to Scholastic's mini-books in order to print most of them out. But I did come across one more Martin Luther King Jr. Book online - Our Friend Martin. This is probably best suited towards preschoolers.

An In-depth Study of Agriculture

At the beginning of this year I decided to utilize as many of the free coloring and activity books as possible. So, I started with the first activity book on the list which is The ABCs of Oklahoma Agriculture. As I started to look through the book I got so happy. The book is a great guide to put together an extensive study on agriculture using various coloring and activity books that I've collected links to over the past few years. I even threw in some recipes that the children and I can make together, to keep school interesting.

Now I can finally put my handy dandy heavy duty stapler to use. Yippee! So below, I have linked to the mini unit study, book(s) , or recipe that I plan to use for each subject.

Agriculture - I used this page as an intro to our studies.
Beef
Cotton
Dogs
Eggs
Feed - I focused on farm instead, since farm animals eat feed. Maryland Agriculture: Farm Fun, Farm Service Agency for Kids,  Southern Maryland Farms
Greenhouse

Horses - Go Harness Racing, Life on a Horse Farm (from NetLibrary)
Insects - Coloring Fun with Insects: I'm going to read the online book to the children. Then I'll let each of them pick out a few insects that they want to color.
Jelly - homemade jelly recipe: We're going to reduce the recipe down to 16 servings, or just one pint.
Kabob
Legume - peanuts (yes, they're legumes)
Milk - Guida's Milk and Supercow, How We Get Our Milk, Milk Matters with Buddy Brush, Fuel Up with Milk
Nuts - Pecan breakfast loaf recipe
Oklahoma - OK coloring book
Pork - Kids Pork Cookbook
Queen Bee - Adventures of Beatrice the Bee
Rain - My Water Activity Book
Sheep - I am the Good Shepherd
Tractor - tractor activity found towards the bottom of the page
University
Veterinarian - Veterinarians
Wheat - whole wheat honey bread recipe
Xylotomy - Trees: A Colorful Look at Our Forests
Yam - yam smoothie recipe
Zucchini - zucchini bread recipe

Eggs Mini Unit Study

I think the Iowa Egg Council website has enough information about eggs on it for me. There are a few egg coloring and activity pages and some fun "eggsperiments" for older students there.

That's pretty much it for now.

Dogs Mini Unit Study

I'm sure that there are numerous resources on the net pertaining to dogs. So, I may revisit this dog mini unit study in the future and add some additional free resources.

Dog Coloring and Activity Books
Be Bite Free
Bow Wow Ow
The Lucky Puppy
Safety Around Dogs