Planning a Unit Study on Animals

This is the first Unit Study I've planned in a long time.   I am using Weaver Volume 1 as a guide.  We are going to study animals for a while, ending the study with a trip to the zoo. 

We began today with a study of animal careers.  Laura read a few books about the job duties of a veterinarian.  Most of the books were for younger kids, but that's alright.  It goes perfectly.  One of the rules I'm using is to not be overly worried about grade levels on the books.  The information I've read says that often, an easier book is quite educational for children to grasp more difficult vocabulary words and concepts in the harder books in a unit study. 

A couple of the books Laura read today are written from a child's perspective about parents that are Veterinarians.  Laura loves animals.  A child's perspective is wonderful for her.  She feels an affinity with the kids in the book.  I don't even think she realizes she is learning.

We are first going to learn a little about Veterinarians, Game Wardens, and Zookeepers.  After that we dig in to Mammals.  I'm loving the library at this point.   There was some awesome books with beautiful pictures at the library put out by National Geographic and Animal Kingdom.  We'll spend a few days on these absorbing information.

I also reinstated read aloud time.  I found this beautiful book at the library called It's All About Jesus written by Allan Jahsmann.  It is a devotional filled with stories about Jesus.  I read two of the stories today.  I'll read a couple of the stories every day.  It doesn't have a lot to do with Animals, but it does have to do with Jesus.

I found out that one of the libraries I use has the Trailblazer Books by Dave and Neta Jackson.  I checked out a couple for Laura to use as readers.  Again, this doesn't have to do with animals.  The way I've broken up the time, however, calls for reading time independent of the unit study.

The animal unit study is still in the works with some of the planning.  There will be lots of reading, a couple movies that I'm going to get from Netflix, and the zoo field trip.  Science, Social Studies, Bible, some Language Arts and Writing, and some Health and Safety are all included in this study.  Weaver plans for a couple of different ideas that I might use.  I don't have access to a lot of the books in Weaver, so I have to substitute.  I also am not going by the scheduled days in Weaver.  We are going to work on this four time a week after we finish Math, English, and the Essay.  A few times the essay is part of the unit study.

I like the fact that Weaver uses the Bible as a base for learning.  I bought Volume 1 last year used.  Some of the pages were missing in the first few units, so I never used it.  However, the later units are complete.  I decided to give it a try and see how things go.  Like Konos, this requires a lot of planning.  However, it hasn't been any worse than grading papers.