Evolution and the beginning of time (resource list)

The beginning of time/evolution, August-October 2011

Topics of focus:
The Big Bang
Charles Darwin
Evolution as a concept
The concept of time and the age of the Earth
The evolution of life on Earth
Food chains, web of life, and conservation of energy

Book list (picture books):
Bang! The Universe Verse, by James Lu Dunbar (a graphic novel—review), and
It's Alive! The Universe Verse Book 2, by James Lu Dunbar (a graphic novel—review)
Born With a Bang: The Universe Tells Our Cosmic Story, Book One, by Jennifer Morgan (review)
From Lava to Life: The Universe Tells Our Earth's Story, Book Two, by Jennifer Morgan (review)
Mammals Who Morph: The Universe Tells Our Evolution Story, Book Three, by Jennifer Morgan
Life on Earth: the Story of Evolution, by Steve Jenkins (review)
Life Story, by Virginia Lee Burton (review)
Our Family Tree, by Lisa Westberg Peters (review)
The Tree of Life, by Peter Sis

Book list (other):
Darwin, by Alice B. McGinty
Darwin and Evolution For Kids: His Life and Ideas With 21 Activities, by Kristan Lawson
Evolution: The Story of Life, by Douglas Palmer
First Life (Life on Earth), from The Diagram Group
Voyage Through Time, The Beginning, by Peter Ackroyd (review)
Who Was Charles Darwin?, by Deborah Hopkinson (review)

Video list:
Before the Dinosaurs: Walking With Monsters (BBC)
Formation of the Solar System, Stephen Hawking (YouTube)

Websites/computer resources:
Back in Time (iPad app)
Cambrian Creatures quiz (Purpose Games website)
Plate tectonic timeline (HSU Natural History Museum website—I printed and laminated the images for our timeline)
Burgess Shale's Wierd Creatures (Smithsonian website)

Activity list:
Coming up with our own specially evolved creatures
Making a felt timeline, to time scale, of the Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and Cenozoic Eras.
Researching and making a few select creatures for the timeline
Playing with said timeline and creatures!
Visiting our local Natural History Museum (University of Michigan)

Math-U-See Alpha (a review)

We've been using Math-U-See for just shy of a year now. I wrote a bit about it back in April when we first got the stuff, but since then we've finished two full lesson books and I figured it was time to revisit the subject.

Overview:
I'm not a curriculum person, but we're very happy with the Math-U-See method. I love how it taps into the visual and tactile aspects of learning with the blocks. I also love that the lessons are presented cleanly (without colorful, cartoony, childish distractions) but are still interesting, especially in the word problems. Concepts are introduced in easily understood lessons that follow a sensible order, practice problems follow a smooth progression from simple to complex, and review problems are included regularly. It's a good method and I'd recommend it.

A quick rundown:
The books don't mention age or grade level for obvious reasons, but we started Calvin in the Primer book. It gives practice with number recognition, the writing of numbers, and with ordinal, nominal, and cardinal number concepts. I gave Calvin the freedom to decide when to work out of the book and how much to do at any given time, which worked well for us. The book and blocks are great together and were a great introduction to math, although looking back I'm not sure I'd buy it again (more below).

Calvin finshed the Primer book in about four months and moved into Alpha. He finished Alpha in about four months and moved into Beta. Curriculum after the Primer is broken into two books: a lesson book arranged in chapters, each with lesson and review pages, and a test book with tests and activty pages for each chapter. There are teacher guides for each level, too, but I never used the guide with the primer so I didn't buy it for the later levels.

Just two complaints:
First, I find the organization of the books annoying. Lessons are in one book, and tests and activity pages are in a second book, which would make sense if it provided purchase choices, but you can't buy them separately so what's the point? The test book, instead of being oragnized by chapter, is first broken down into two sections—activity pages in the front, test pages in the back—and then by chapter. That means that I can easily remove the activity page that coincides with the chapter we're on, but I have to flip through the book to find the coinciding test, and then, because it's halfway through the book, it's not easy to remove via the perforations. I'd find it easier to use if activity pages and test pages were at least together by chapter, and even more so if all pages (lesson, review, test, and activities) together by chapter.

Second, the flow from the Primer level to Alpha is poor. The progression of the Primer feels different than that in Alpha, so moving from one to the next was a bit shocking. Also, the first half of Alpha was mostly review of things that had been covered—obsessively and fully—in Primer, but new concepts and view points were introduced here and there as well, making it impossible to skip forward. So, having completed the Primer level we found the first half of Alpha tedious. Since Alpha flows nicely into Beta, and although I'm sure the Primer level is laid out to introduction of concepts to younger children, the overlap is annoying enough to negate the positives, and looking back I think the Primer level was a waste of time and money.

Overall, though, I'm very pleased with the method and the books and would recommend them to anyone looking for a math curriculum.

Weekly book shelf 1/13

Happy Friday the thirteenth!

Reading to himself:

This is another book that I bought at a used book shop. It has a beautiful, heavy feel to it, and is sprinkled with eerily pretty illustrations. Calvin has read and reread it several times this week.

Reading together:

We've been reviewing some human evolution,s o we're revisiting the A Day With series by Fiorenzo Facchini (Homo habilis, Homo erectus, Neanderthal Man, and Homo sapiens). It's out of print, but I still highly recommend this series if you can find it. Many times when copies become available they're pretty high priced, so I just kept stalking ebay and Amazon until I found them, one at a time, offered by more reasonable sellers. I got all four at prices between $12 and $18 each, and I'm very glad to have them all on our shelves.

Weekly book shelf 1/6/12

Happy new year! We are still only slowly waking up from the holiday hibernation period—that time period when we tuck ourselves away from the daily grind to pursue celebratory delights and warmly fuzzy hobbies. We'll slowly stretch and get back on schedule, but it might take a while. Bears don't wake fully, ready to go all in a day, do they? And if they do, they're probably pretty grouchy about it.

Reading to himself:

This is a book that I picked up at a library book sale at some point. It sat on our shelf unnoticed for quite some time, probably because the kid wasn't quite ready to read it yet, but this week I found him sitting on the couch just eating it up. It's an abridged, but not murdered, version of the story with great 1950s color illustrations. This exact version may be out of print.

No other notes for right now, not because we aren't reading, but because we are doing a lot of re-reading or skimming through old favorites that we find on our shelves while we try to find our routine.

Weekly book shelf 12/16

Reading aloud:

Being great lovers of L. Frank Baum, when I discovered that he'd written a Christmas story about the origins of Santa Claus, I knew we had to give it a try. We read this aloud in one week, partly because it is a relatively short chapter book, but also because Calvin couldn't enough of it, so we didn't put it down for long. Wonderfully fanciful and imaginative, this is a Santa Claus story like none other. The story line was loosely followed in Santa Claus is Comin' to Town, a stop motion Christmas special released in 1970.

Reading to himself:

Every year we buy Calvin a Christmas book for Saint Nicholas Day. Prior to this year those books have been the classic picture books with beautiful illustrations. He's in a transition age now where he still loves picture books, but is looking for denser reading materials, so when I found an illustrated copy of Baum's The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, we figured that was the perfect solution. Since we read the chapter book aloud in a matter of a few days, he's been drinking up the illustrated version over and over again throughout the rest of the week, a habit I think likely to continue through the holiday.