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Scheduling Jack's Insects for one term
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Has anyone done Jack’s Insects and the companion Narration and Nature Study Notebook in one term? I am thinking springtime for finding insects, since we take a 6 – 8 week summer break. This book is huge! It has 20 chapters. Is 1/2 chapter per day reasonable? How and when do you schedule in the extra books & written narrations?
This is for grade 5. He will be 11 yo in the spring. I am looking for something he can do himself and I thought this might be a good fit, and help him get started with the written narrations.
We started Jack’s Insects this year and my 8YO especially really loved it. I found that the reading was taking a long time, though, and really wished that I could have found it on audio.
IMO, I think it would be a lovely book to do (with the narrations) over a full year with kids around the ages of 7-10. I think it’s too much to do during a summer break, though. There is so much to savor and so many rabbit trails you could take.
(And, just thinking out loud, it would be lovely to combine with the Discovery Education membership that is free over the summer on Homeschool Buyers’ Co-op. The children could research and learn so much more about the insects they are reading about in the book.)
I assigned Jack’s Insects plus the companion last year to my dd who was 11 at the time. I think that I assigned too much for her. We tried to do ALL of the books that went along with it. This was too much for us. I assigned too much and gave too little time for what I has assigned on a weekly basis.
I guess what I learned from all this is that Jack’s Insects can be done in many different ways. It is very flexible. The books and articles assigned to go with it seem to have a broad range of difficulty/reading levels. This is actually very nice because you can tailor it to fit your child and your schedule.
For us, if we could do last year over, I would have had her read smaller portions of the book at one time or I would have read part of the chapter out loud to her.
HTH. 🙂
I was thinking of doing Jack’s Insects with my 7 year old this year. I was just going to spread it out over the whole year. For those who’ve read it, do you think that would work?
Watching this thread as I have this scheduled over the year for my two and am curious if it is not going to go well that way. My two are 8 & 9. I will be reading it to them. Any advice from those that have done this book?
We used it a few years ago before the Notebook was available – it came out as we were finishing the book. I have the notebook, though, for my other set of kids, lol. It looks great.
The chapters are long and I was reading them aloud…I found myself dividing them into 2-4 sections if we were keeping to CM’s principle of short lessons and time to ruminate on them. I would look up pictures and such to show them the insects, etc. and we would occasionally put something in our nature journals – those that we had personal experience with, anyway.
We all enjoyed it very much. It was great fun to go to the zoo’s butterfly house and see the excitement as we found several Great Blue Morpho butterflies. =)
You could try the one term thing, but I suspect that the study would be more fun to take some additional time. What if you read one chapter a week and did the additional books the next week? It stretches it out longer than you want, but would help keep it in the shorter lesson range, and you wouldn’t have to miss something.
MissusLeta-
The Jack’s Insects study could be set up for a 7 yr old, I would think.
Another idea -have you thought about 106 Days of Creation or Outdoor Secrets plus the Outdoor Secrets Companion?
I have 106 days of Creation Studies since my 7 year old is my oldest of 4, that would probably be a good thing to do. But I have Jack’s Insects and wouldn’t have to by the extra things for 106 Days.
We do Classical Conversations and they’ll be learning anatomy there. I won’t do a lot more with that at home, I just thought a fun nature book would be a good addition. I have a couple others that might work better. I guess I’ll have to compare them.
The reviews in the bookstore for Jack’s Insects indicates it is a book for older grades – at least 4th grade. I was looking to have only my 5th grader reading it himself. But I may wait on it until my daughter is 4th grade and then read aloud to them both, possibly at bedtime if we are through the Jean Henri Fabre books by then. I found his books free https://archive.org/details/storybookscienc00bickgoog
My 7 year old can listen to books way beyond his grade level and really enjoy them. But I’m not sure about this one yet.
Here is a link to some free audios of Jean Henri Fabre’s book on librivox.org, too:
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