Biology

The big news this week – we started Biology! Last year, I found a wonderful science curriculum for younger kids. We started with Chemistry over the summer, and I bought Biology with the intent on using it for summer lessons in 2010. Because of the unplanned break we had to take in order to get the house on the market, we ended up not having any summer lessons. I decided to incorporate it into our regular school year instead. Our main curriculum (Five in a Row) only has 15 books in volume 3, which is what we will be using this year, so there was room to add in Biology & History. (I’ve already mentioned History in my previous blog posts, but as a recap, I had also intended that to be a summer 2010 lesson.)

Our Bio lessons this week were a lot of fun. Caleb enjoyed looking at the colorful pictures in the textbook while Jimmy remembered some of the picture styles from our Chemistry text. They both enjoyed the experiment (we had to “classify” a group of household objects in several different ways).

In looking through Jimmy’s math materials, I found a discrepancy between the teacher’s manual & the workbook. Somewhere (I can’t remember where), I read that Jimmy would be writing the date on his workbooks starting somewhere in the middle of the school year. I flipped ahead in his workbook & found where he’ll be using M/D/YYYY format, but there were no spaces in previous worksheets for the standard date format (i.e. Jan 8, 2011). Starting on Tuesday, I instructed Jimmy to write the date (standard format) on his worksheet after his name. He caught on right away! I feel a little like a rebel. LOL