The Ins and Outs of Me

Since Christmas, my girls and I have been learning about the human body, and things are going well.

The core book, or spine, that we use is the Kingfisher's First Encyclopedia of the Human Body. I actually rather like the book. Subjects are covered in two page spreads which are not overly crowded with photos or information. Pictures are simple, colorful, and fun. The text is also simple and straight forward, and the concepts are geared toward young children. More often then not, they also have small experiments that can be done to illustrate different concepts. (For example, when talking about how muscles work, they have the readers bent their arm, feeling both the triceps and biceps change shape.)

For lessons, I have clumped subjects together into about 16 groups. They are only four to six pages of text, or about 20 minutes reading. We read the pages, do any activities on those pages, and then color pictures about what we studied. While the girls are coloring, I ask them about whatever experiment we did and fill out an experiment page (What did we use? What did we do? What happened? What did we learn?). After (or before) that, I ask the girls to tell me about what they learned, and I write that down too. Simple, and it only takes 30 to 40 minutes.

I have not been able to find a simple enough coloring book, so for pictures to color, I have traced some of the drawings in the book, photo copied them, and let my girls color. (Copy paper is really useful here :)