For the 3rd year, Ben and I are participating in a small co-op with 2 other families. We have loved this time together because after we teach the kids, they play and the mom’s have some much needed girl-chat time!
We started back today with just 2 of the 3 families and had so much fun! For this school year, we will be working through some of the projects from the book, A Child’s Geography: Explore His Earth, by Ann Voskamp. I absolutely love this book! If you are a Charlotte Mason fan and would like an easy-to-use text, with fun projects, for leaning about our earth, I think this one will please you. You can get a glimpse by viewing the first 3 chapters here.
In the first week, the book list recommends the delightful picture book, If the World Were a Village. This is a book that Ben and I were familiar with, having read it a couple of years ago, so we knew we wanted to read it again. We added this free and simple lapbook for the book from Homeschool Share, and it really made the unit come alive! We were able to complete the lapbook in about an hour. It was designed for a co-op setting, so the minit books are quick and easy, just what we needed!
The premise of the book is to take the world population and make it a population of 100 people. Then learn how many of those 100 would speak Chinese, practice Islam, go to school, have enough to eat, and more. It really made it easy for the children (and us moms) to understand our world a little better. And the math abounded as we reviewed percentages and graphing. I know that Ben and I will be referring back to this book and lapbook many times over the next school year, as we travel the world, continent by continent. I believe our future studies will prove to make this information even more real to him. All of the kids were amazed, and saddened, to here that only 32% of the world is Christian. Just taking that information and building on it will make missions more important in their sweet, young lives.
Here are a few pictures of our awesome day and lapbook!
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| The lapbook cover and picture book |
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| inside the book….languages |
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| inside the book–Religion |
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| Ben working on his lapbook minits |
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| gluing the minits into the lapbook |
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| more gluing |
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| the lapbook |
