Our Week In Review

 This would be for last week. :-)


We did all the usual work, but focused on our writing assignments which we'd been working on for the past two weeks.  To wrap up our three week study of South America in the early 1800's, each of the children chose a South American country to write about.  The specifics of the assignment were as follows:

I specifically added the "one picture must stick out from your poster" part to give each of the children a chance to be artistic and creative.  I was curious how each child would choose to do this. 

Little Man chose to study and write about the country of Bolivia.  For one of the four pictures on his finished poster, he chose to put a map showing where Bolivia is located.  Here he is coloring in the country of Bolivia on a map of South America.

Sons G and L chose the countries of Peru and Ecuador, respectively.  Son G became fascinated with Machu Picchu, while son L was enthralled with the Nate Saint missionary/martyr story (he chose to write about missionary work in Ecuador for his fourth paragraph).  Son C, not pictured, chose to write about Venezuela.

Daughter G chose the country of Brazil.  She had such FUN with this assignment ~ spending hours and hours researching this particular country, finding pictures that would adequately represent the incredible flora and fauna of the Amazon region, and choosing the subject for her "famous person" paragraph (retired soccer star, Pele).  Her poster is the only one completely finished.  Unit celebration is fast approaching this weekend, so everyone else is finishing up with their poster assembly this week!

I love writing assignments.  They can encompass so much learning from many different disciplines.  We did quite a bit of internet research, so I had the opportunity to help direct the children in how to do this.  We did use some info from wikipedia, but talked about how usually that source is just overwhelming because there is almost too much info.  Certainly for the scope of their paragraphs, I discouraged wiki.  We found books at the library, we read, we outlined, we wrote, we edited, we typed, we printed pictures, we drew pictures, we worked a bit on graphic design ~ the laying out of all the pieces on posterboard.  Such great learning!  And the children really know about their country of choice, so much more than they would have known otherwise.

I can't wait to display these posters at our unit celebration!