If you’ve read some of my posts over the past few weeks, you may have noticed quite a few comments here and there about books and activities related to horses. Although it really wasn’t my intention to begin with, Miss M’s Expert Day project for co-op turned into a fairly full fledged unit on horses.
Here’s how her display for expert day turned out as we set it up at home for a practice run:
Do you have a horse lover in your life? Here are the primary resources we used:
Hands of a Child Horse Lapbook (lots of general information on horses). Here’s how we put together the completed lapbook project:
DK Eyewitness video, “Horses” (scientific and historical information)
Once Upon a Horse (historical information – read my thoughts on it in this post!)
Various books about how to draw horses
A few “easy non fiction” books from the library (which we already returned before I remembered to write down the titles!). Some Miss M read on her own time, and a few I assigned as part of her school work.
We also checked out The Complete Horse and The Kingfisher Horse and Pony Encyclopedia to have on hand for further research. Both looked interesting, but we didn’t end up having time to dive into these very much.
We read Misty of Chincoteage as a horse-related literature selection. I wrote about my impressions of that read-aloud last week.
Miss M picked the broad topic of Horses for Expert Day, but since she only has three minutes to give a presentation, I encouraged her to pick a much narrower topic to focus in on. She decided to focus on how people used horses throughout history. Since even that is a very broad topic, she chose to narrow it down even further and discuss how horses were used in war and for travel during her three minute oral report. I was able to work with Miss M on important skills like defining a topic, reading for the purpose of research, and summarizing important points of what she read. She narrated to me what she wanted to say in her oral report, and I transcribed and helped her refine what she was saying.
As much as it was a lot of work, I am glad we have Expert Day at co-op each year to push us to work on these skills!
I’m linking up with:
Homeschool Discoveries 