Lesson 15 ~ Elephant

It was great to get back to school! In MFW's plan there are four weeks of learning about wild animals. Since there is no section that teaches geography that I can see, I decided to incorporate the continents into the wild animal lessons. So while elephant this week we also learned about Asia! Here's what we did:

Map Work: First we located Asia on the map as a whole.

Then we labeled a few countries in Asia.

I asked one of his grandparents to buy him the leapfrog tag map set for Christmas and it is fabulous for map work. There are little kids located around the world and you can hear them say something in their language, tell you what they eat for a meal, and play music listened to in their country! I thought that was pretty neat.

Books: MFW recommends The Elephant Who Couldn't Forget which sounds cute but our library didn't have it. Their next recommendation is 17 Kings and 42 Elephants. Our library did have that book but I found it ... let's just say ... we didn't read it. :) I did find this Rookie Read-About Geography collection at our library which is fabulous! We checked out one for each continent we're learning about this month. Chris was able to read through them well while learning a few new words and retained what he read. They are on my wish list that is how much I and the boys enjoyed them. Two books we enjoyed were Grandma Elephant's In Charge by Martin Jenkins and Elephants Can Paint Too! by Katya Arnold.

Music: We finally did one of the music activities that came with the curriculum! The first activity is dancing to Mozart while balancing a bean bag on your head. The boys had fun with it and it was nice including music in our school day. I plan to do one once a week now. I looked them over and they don't take long and there is hardly any planning involved. For the bean bag I put beans in a sock and tied the sock in a knot. 2 minutes!

Worksheets: There are now 5 worksheets a week. One for each day. The last one is a story book they put together. If you don't know and want to know about MFW (kindergarten) - you start out with three worksheets and by Lesson 15 (17 weeks into) you are have 5 a week.

Videos: Amazon's Video On Demand has a National Geographic series called Really Wild Animals. Each episode is $1.99 and they have two for each continent (that we are learning about). I chose one for Asia and they watched it two times during the week. They are around 20 minutes long so it's not a lot of TV time but they get a glimpse of animals in that continent and what parts of it look like.

Well I think that about wraps up what we did with MFW curriculum.