What is a Bird?

We are continuing to read a few sections of What is a Bird? each day. Before the boys woke today, I went on-line and found some free coloring pages of birds, copied them into Publisher, and then added text lines underneath. All three picked the bird they liked, and worked on coloring them while I read. After I was done, each boy took turns telling something that makes a bird a bird. Then, after they were done coloring, they wrote the four main attributes of a bird on the lines under their picture. For my oldest and middle sons, it was their copywork for the day - they told me the attributes, I wrote them on a separate piece of paper, then they copied the words onto their papers.

 

This is my three year old's bird picture. We looked up his bird in the Audubon First Field Guide of Birds and he did a very good job getting his colors close to the actual coloring of the bird. (I wrote for him. ;) )

 

My middle son's picture. He was very proud of his coloring of the cardinal and his printing.

 

And my oldest son's picture. (He *loves* cursive writing and makes sure I put all his copywork in cursive for him; he not as fond of "translating" printing into cursive even though he can do it.) 

Tonight we will continue reading about Peter Rabbit's bird friends from the Burgess Bird Book. I think next week we will take a field trip to our local nature center and see what we can find there.

Copywork meets Nature Study

When we decided to get more structured back in the spring, my oldest son started doing copywork or dictation every day. We tended to alternate, with the dictation coming from his spelling program All About Spelling. This summer my middle son started doing very simple dictation and copywork. After talking with the boys, we decided to drop the dictation for now and just stick with copywork (they prefer copywork, so I figure that some days I'll focus on writing elements from Writing With Ease and some days I'll just write out a sentence from their spelling program so they are practicing that day's spelling concepts without it having to be dictation). Here is what my oldest son did yesterday.

 

We have been reading The Burgess Bird Book for Children; my oldest son especially has been enjoying the stories. For the past couple weeks we have been working on abbreviations in writing - months of the year, days of the week, and common abbreviations like Mrs., Mr., Dr., and the such. So yesterday I had him write a sentence about Jenny (Mrs.) Wren and Mr. Wren. His picture is what really got me though. His writing is consistently neat and nice. He takes great pride in it. But he has never been huge on artwork. He'll illustrate most of his copywork and dictation sentences. And sometimes he really gets into it, but yesterday he really put a lot of time and attention into his drawing. He was so proud of his work and so am I. 

 

We keep writing, science (which is sorely lacking), history (lacking as well), and nature study/observations (this is the first) in a 3-ring binder. The boys really enjoy looking back over their work to see how much they have improved and matured in their work.