We have just about finished our unit study on Australia. We used the E-book, Expedition Australia. You can purchase this E-book from www.thehomeschoolmagazine.com for $7.95. Or you can buy the Welcome Spring Bundle for $24.00 and get Expedition Australia, Pizza Party, Spring Surprises, Kite Capers, and you will get Birthday Bonanza for FREE! This E-book is geared for grades K-4th.
My 2nd and 3rd grader enjoyed this unit though I did skip some things that were too elementary for them. And as the parent and teacher we have a great idea what level our kids are at. Like with this unit they had you cut out mama kangaroos in different colors and they were suppose to match the joeys to the mamas of the same color. At 7 and 8 they have long mastered their colors so I skipped this activity. For a Kindergartner this would be great reinforcement of skills and concepts being taught.
I would rather introduce concepts that might be a little harder for them than to keep introducing concepts that they have mastered. I would rather they be challenged than bored. I do try to keep a balance of things that they will be able to master quickly with those that are really challenging, because I don't want them to end up frustrated.
I wanted to study each of the continents in a little more detail. After we study each continent I want to then pick certain countries to study. And in the case with the USA we will then study each state.
I bought a little passport booklet from our local school supply store, and we will add a sticker or stamp for each place that we "visit." This will be an easy way for me to keep track of what we have studied in just a glance.
This unit is actually a lapbook. For those of you who are not familiar with lapbooks, the basic concept is that at the end of your study of a particular subject your child will have a completed project to show what they have learned. The lapbook is made by each student and it is a representation of their work, so for you perfectionist parents/teachers this is where you will need to step back and let them do this on their own.
To build a lapbook you take a file folder and have your child decorate it with information they have learned. There are many different websites out there about how to build lapbooks, so I won't take the time to describe it in this post. I will save that for a later post.
The E-book is meant to take you a week to complete. The unit is broken up into 5 lessons--one per day. This E-book is meant to at the end have your student end up with both a lapbook and a themed notebook is you desire. I didn't worry about keeping all the papers and putting them into a notebook, but we did do the lapbook. That's one reason homeschooling is so great, you get to decide what to do with your kids work--what to save and what to toss.
Like always I started by reading through the whole thing myself and deciding what we would and would not use. I then printed out the pages that my girls would need and skipped the ones we would not use.
I loved that this E-book is downloadable as soon as you purchase it and I could get the materials right away instead of waiting for it to arrive in the mail. But again there is something to be said about a physical book that you hold in your hands that you turn the pages. I made the decision to go with this E-book because there was not a ton of information to read in the E-book, but it did have a lot of links to many additional resources online.
When we do a lapbook I like to keep all the pieces in a Ziploc bag with each girls name on the front. And then when we have completed all the work we then spend an afternoon putting it together. This allows the girls to see where everything will be placed before it is glued down and they can move pieces around. This also allows us to know if we will need to glue another file folder or two together.
Expedition Australia is full of tons of great information. You will learn about animals native to Australia like koalas, kangaroos, wombats, platypus, and tasmanian devils--my girls love learning about animals so we spent a bit of time looking up more information about these animals.
They also cover places in Australia and the language of Australia. You will also learn about the culture, continents, and study maps of Australia.
This E-book covers History, Geography, Reading, Writing, Science, Spelling, Vocabulary, Art and more.
This is a great start to our journey around the world, I think we will be taking more than 80 days to do it in though!
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