Posts Tagged ‘lesson plans’
Sneak Peek: History of Fashion Through Textiles
History of Fashion Through Textiles is a 4 module unit study covering cotton, silk, wool and flax. It describes the process from raw material to cloth, including the history of the use of the cloth. Activities within the unit study include math, history, science, art and more making it a cross-curricular unit of study.
Here is a sneak peek:
Module 3: Cotton
As you get ready to start a new year of lessons make sure you are aware of all your children’s learning styles. There are three main learning styles Auditory (hearing), Visual (seeing) and Kinetic (doing). A child can be strong in one particular style or a combination of two styles.
It is important to understand a child’s learning style so that you can find the best way to teach to them. Of course it is important to develop all the learning styles in a child but especially necessary to teach to their learning style on a subject that they struggle with.
Be creative with your lesson plans so that each learning style is practiced. This is especially helpful when teaching more than one child the same topic. Use manipulatives in math, science and spelling class (for kinetic learners), Read stories out loud or use music to accompany lessons (for audio learners) and use pictures and colour codes to help the visual learner.
If you want to find out your child’s learning style, download this free questionnaire.
Getting ready for back to school means having lesson plans ready to go. A great asset to you lesson plans is downloadable workbooks.
Ebooks are quick to download, ready when you are, no problems with out of stock or out of print resources. Ebooks are broad ranged or specific so they can be used for review or in a theme study. Downloadable workbooks let you print only the pages you need, as many times as you need them. There are thousands of titles available and even a chance to preview some of the pages before you buy!
All you need is internet access, a computer and a printer and you can have thousands of books, workbooks and theme units at your fingertips!
Everyone has heard about the BP oil spill that resulted from an oil rig explosion in April. Although the flow of oil has now been capped, the repercussions have only just begun.
Nature and the environment are a great Science lesson. The oil spill can add to this lesson by showing the damage that occurs when the delicate balance is destroyed. Incorporate geography so kids can see where the spill occurred, and track the waterways that may show evidence of the oil spill. Create science experiments that show how oil and water react together and try to figure out ways to clean the oil from the water. Create a project about sea life and what kinds of animals are affected by the oil spill, directly and indirectly. Even an economic lesson plan could be created to identify the loss to the local fisherman and other water based businesses.
It is easy to lay the blame on the company and its slow reaction to the problem, but discuss with the students what they might have done. How long would their ‘fix’ take to implement, would it work? Obviously the oil spill is a disaster but more time should be spent on solving the problem and preventing it from happening again then on what could have been done better.
Current events can make great lesson plans and keep students up to date in the world.
So, the first mountain you have climbed led you to the decision to homeschool your child. It sure was an uphill battle but at last you have reached the top and feel accomplished.
So now, your child would like to learn about car mechanics, or magpies or even mustard plants. But you don’t know about any of those things! In this case, there really isn’t a mountain to climb. It is just a little hill that can easily be reached by a little reading and research. Look to the library for books on the subject, or find some unit studies and workbooks to help you plan a lesson. Ask people in the neighbourhood or family that have had experience with the subject and just get in there and learn it together!
Homeschooling does have its share of mountains to climb, but teaching subjects that are unfamiliar doesn’t have to be one of them. You may be surprised how much you learn, and enjoy learning in the process!
Pictures and photos are great tools to use in lesson plans.
Not only can you incorporate a photography or art lesson, but you can also bring in science, english, history and more. Have the student create a photo mosaic of a field trip or family vacation, this could include, maps, postcards, photos and drawings about the event. Use photos to tell a story, photos can be a great way to inspire creative writing. Cut out pictures from a magazine and write a poem about them. Use pictures to create a historical timeline, this can help create understanding of the flow of events as well as create memory aids to remember the important time period. Use drawings to create a gadget or new invention, then write a description about how it works. Take a photo of a plant and then label it with the various parts. Use photos to make flashcards, a memory game or a scrapbook, familiar pictures will have more meaning to the student and keep their interest level high!
Sequencing, following instructions, creative writing and even math concepts can all incorporate pictures, a personal way to learn and much easier for the visual learner.
Music is a great learning tool for the classroom. It is especially useful for auditory learners.
Music can be from sounds of the orchestra in an actual music lesson but can also be incorporated into other subjects to help remember important details. School House Rock did a great job of incorporating music into lessons to teach about grammar, government and more. After all these years I can still remember the songs!
Sounds are as effective as songs. Having a beat to do multiplication tables can be quite useful. Clapping out syllables or tapping through spelling words can all generate a type of music into the lesson plan. Not only does it help kids remember the information, but it can keep kids moving too.
Try music with dance for a bit of exercise or a fifteen minute break. Music helps soothe the body and the dance can help get some anxieties out. Bring music into the science lesson by learning about sound waves, the ear or how animals use sound. Bring it into history by learning the background of different instruments, the biographies of various composers or the history of the different genres of music. In English you can analyze song lyrics, or write you own songs. And you can bring it into art by drawing while listening to music to feel the music and interpret it into a picture.
Combining music with each subject is an entertaining way to make the lessons more sharp and less flat!
Projects are a great way for kids to learn. They involve research, investigations, writing, drawing, experiments and more.
Combine as many subjects as possible to a project for a cross-curricular lesson. For example, a clay rendition of a frog’s life cycle (art/science), a field trip report on a visit to a pond (geography), a graph as to how many frogs were counted at the pond (math), a book report on a story about frogs (english) and so on.
Make the project ready for display and have a little project fair so your student can share their work with others (can be with family, friends or join in with other homeschoolers.) You can make certificates to award for certain topics – scariest topic, biggest project etc. Presenting their project in a fair style encourages them to express what they have learned as well as giving them an opportunity to speak in front of others. It will give them a feeling of pride for their accomplishment as well as allow others to offer encouragement and appreciation for the work.
A project lesson can take several weeks – time spent learning and having fun!
Mneumonics are memory aids. They can be rhymes, acrostics, acronyms and other devices to help remember key facts. They are especially helpful to auditory learners.
Remember the rhyme about Christopher Columbus we learned in school? In fourteen hundred and ninety-two Columbus sailed the ocean blue. I will always remember the year he discovered America thanks to this rhyme.
What if you needed to know the line up of planets from the Sun? Create a sentence using the first letter of each planet to start a word in the sentence. For example: My Very Excited Mom Just Started Using New Pillows. The first letter of each word in the sentence represents the planets and all the words in the sentence show us the order of the planets. This is a good technique to help remember the order of many different things.
Acronym is an abbreviation of several words in such a way that the abbreviation itself forms a pronounceable word. For example SCUBA stands for Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus. This is another way you can use to help remember important things – such as the Great Lakes – use the acronym HOMES to identify Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie and Superior.
Mneumonics are fun to use to show differences in similar words. Stalactites and Stalagmites are similar words, both representing formations of rock within a cave. StalaGmites has a G in it so it represents the one that grows from the Ground and StalacTites grow from the Top.
Encourage children to make up their own rhymes, acrostics, acronyms or other memory aids – they will remember them better that way.
A unit study is a set of lessons, worksheets and more on a specific topic of interest.
Each topic provides comprehensive, cross0curricular activities to inspire and educate a child in science, social studies, language arts, math, fine arts and more.
They can encompass various learning levels making it useful to teach more than one child at different learning levels. It can work well with different learning styles because it offers a variety of lessons that focus on each learning style – an art lesson for the visual learner, a field trip or science experiment for the kinesthetic learner and a poetry or rhyme section for the audio learner for example. Since each lesson is based on the same topic it can give options on how to study the topic that best suits each child.
Unit studies can be downloadable which saves money, time and the environment since you only print the pages you need. They can provide fun and learning for your child and encompass puzzle sheets to “reward” children for finishing a more challenging exercise.