Kids overwhelmed by Zoo I/chapter 1

Yes, it does get easier!  Maybe you could skim those sections and then move onto more interesting ones to see if that captures them more?  Gina

Oh, a quick tip, for the putting them in order card game I included one index card that had the correct order  – but I only drew colored circles.  That is why each word was a different color.  Then my daughter had to use the color order card the first few times to put the words in order before I turned her loose with remembering it herself, AND every time she played she had to correct the order if she messed up and read them out loud in the right order twice.  Make sense?

We’re in the same boat! It took us 5 1/2 weeks to get thru lesson one, reading short sections at a time. Which in hindsight i wonder if it made it worse by making the material more choppy and losing the flow. I had attributed it to the fact that this is our first “offical” year and I have a first grader. He did much better with a hands-on activity for classification, we sorted some animal pictures we had in the house, although animal toys or stuffed animals would have worked too. Physically moving the animals himself helped some, enough to get the general idea of how animals are sorted into groups, but I know classifcation details and the menomic didn’t “stick” at all. As Tara said, we’ll get next time around!

We’re on lesson 2 now and it’s more interesting. But honestly, we are still struggling and my son is a HUGE bird lover, which is why I chose this for science. But still, he’s not as interested in the material as I thought he would be. On the other hand he’s really excited about the drawing birds book, bird-sound book etc. that I’ve checked out from the library for him. These titles were listed in the notebooking journal “extras” page with lesson 2. I cannot change course materials either and have to find some way to make this work or come up with an alternate plan.

I have been using the Mammal book with a co-op this year. They have had difficulty with parts of it. However, I’m finding that if I take the topic and use living books from the library to explain it, they like it better. I read one paragraph or two out of the book itself and then read the library book. It is definitely taking me longer, but the kids don’t seem as overwhelmed and are enjoying camping out on specific animals. In fact, they are narrating really well. Also, I don’t have to spend a lot of money or look for ideas about putting together my own curriculum. It really does provide a great outline.

We started with Zoo 2 for Swimming creatures, because the kids had more interest in that. I printed the chart from the sample chapter of zoo 1 to briefly explain classifying. I think we spent only 1 or 2 day on that and we moved on. I don’t expect them to totally understand that, but to know in general how and why animals are classified (and that humans are NOT animals). We read some stories in picture books and short chapter books at bed time on the same topic. That helped peak their interest.

We also did lapbooks with the first five chapters and they would cut while I read and then they would orally narrate and then write down what was appropriate on the mini-book for the lapbook. If you don’t want to do the lapbook, you could do some sort of science journal. If you don’t want to spend the money on the corresonding lapbooks, you could go by topic for the free lapbooks at http://www.homeschoolshare.com. That is what we started with and when I realized that it worked for us, I ordered the corresponding lapbook on sale. Even coloring pages with corresponding animals have been useful while reading these books to them. We have had fun with the “try this” and experiments at the lesson end. But for now, we are taking a break from these books and just using picturebooks from the library of the kids’ interests. We’ll pick up zoo 2 again soon, to finish.