All About Me Unit Study

What a great week we've had with our All About Me unit study.  Here's what we did...

{Day 1 - God Made Me Special}

Today, in addition to our regular reading, phonics, and handwriting lessons, we read a new book: Quick as a Cricket by Audrey Wood.  What a great book!  I definitely see us borrowing this from the library again.  The three children and I read this book snuggled up together.  As I read each page, the kiddos acted out each animal (snail, lion, ant, lamb, etc).   

This was difficult at times, as Scout was in a silly mood and wanted to keep tackling Merrick every few seconds.  

Here's Merrick the Monkey...

After we read the book, Merrick completed a little print out I made for him.  Since he loooooves marble runs, I found a picture of a marble run and some marbles online and printed them out.  On each of the marbles, we wrote one way that God made Merrick special.

Not sure if you can read the pic below, but these are a few things about Merrick that he feels makes him special.  I started him off by saying, "funny."  He followed up with these qualities:

- kind to others

 - run fast like a race car

- strong ("I pushed Sawyer's bed")

- good at marble runs

- big brother

- good at monkey acting & sounds

{Day 2 - My Home}

This day, we discussed where Merrick lives.  First, we read This Is Me and Where I Live by Joanne Fitzgerald.  Apparently, I neglected to get a picture of the book.  Bummer.  After reading the book, we did a few pages in our Evans Morris geography workbook.  Merrick was pretty excited about this as it is not a normal part of our daily routine.  

Next, we made this "Me On a Map" mini-book describing where Merrick lives.  The smallest circle has a picture of him standing in front of his house on his street (not shown in the pic).  Each circle gets larger and describes his neighborhood, city, state, country, and planet.  I got the idea from this site.

This is an example of a page.  Merrick glued different pictures describing facts about Texas (state bird, flower, etc) on the "My State" circle.  Naturally, we glued a Longhorn on Austin.  Hook em'!

Next, I thought it would be super cool to make a map of Austin, TX on a shower curtain.   I bought the curtain at the discount store for $3.  I thought Merrick would love to use Sharpie markers to color in the map as I went along.  He didn't.  He got bored very quickly and was totally discouraged that the markers only came in primary colors.  He wanted to color the houses the "right" color.  

I made sure to draw the directional arrows (compass) on the bottom right corner as we saw in our geography workbook.  Later, we got to use this map to reinforce learning our directions.  Merrick can put his car on his "house."  Then I say, "In what direction do you need to go to get to the Austin Children's Museum?"

I taped two black Sharpie markers to the sides of a water bottle in order to make drawing the roads a LOT easier.  It took about a minute with the help of the water bottle.  It would have probably taken a half hour otherwise (and not looked nearly as nice).

After I finished drawing the map, Merrick got happy again.  He loves getting his Hot Wheels cars out and playing on the map.  

{Day 3 - My Feelings}

Here are a few books we read when discussing our feelings.  Again, Merrick acted out the animal parts of Sometimes I Feel Like a Mouse.  We used this time especially to talk about what we can do when we feel angry.  Here are the things we reiterate when discussing anger:

When we get angry, we can...

- pray

- make a drawing of our feelings

- tell the person why we are angry

- go for a run outside (with Mommy)

- hit a pillow

{Day 4 - My Body}

Today, we learned about the different parts of the body.  We read Here Are My Hands by Bill Martin Jr and John Archambault.  Then, all of the kiddos and I did the hokey pokey dance.  They loved this!  I was sure to put in parts of the body we don't often refer to like the wrist or ankle.  

{Day 5 - My Family}

Sadly, I had a hard time finding books on family at the library.  We ended up with this book, Hold My Hand by Charlottle Zolotow.  We just read two of the short stories that applied more to our family situation (stories about having little brothers/sisters that sometimes bother us, etc).  It wasn't my favorite book of the week, but it worked.

Afterward, we made a family tree.  For his handwriting practice, Merrick wrote a letter to his cousin Jack, who he adores.  Merrick told me what he wanted to say, then I typed it out in a special "dashed print" font I found online so he could write over it.  The first line to his cousin went something like this: "I think you are so cool and awesome. " :)

{All About Me Lapbook}

We are not lapbook experts.  Merrick has made one other lapbook before and he just lights up when I bring it out.  He is so proud of his lapbooks.  The thing I love about these books is that after we finish the study, the book remains as a reminder of what we've learned.  

Thankfully, there are many free All About Me lapbook printables here at Homeschool Share.

Here's how ours turned out:

You can also watch the video to get a description of the book.  The video is a little shaky at times because my little girl, Scout, kept climbing on me.  I almost just deleted the video, but, when I played it back, I just loved watching how she was getting into every thing we were trying to do.  It was just precious to me.