Hands-On Learning

This year in school, we are studying "Rome to the Reformation" together as a theme unit study.  I love learning together for many reasons.  But, one of the best things is that we can do projects and experiments together and not have to repeat different projects six times at different levels.  I don't think that I would actually do that and we would loose much of what I believe is so important about education...learning hands-on. 

Here are a few pictures of this past week's projects.

Writing like a Roman:

We made a background and border from cardboard and then pressed clay in the middle.  The kids could then use a stick to write.

Making a cell model:

 Here we used a ziploc bad, yellow jello, and a grape to represent the three main parts of a cell.  Most of the kids ate their cell model for afternoon snack.  A little gross but the kids will remember these parts for years to come:)

Creating mini books of the Bible to learn how books are put together to create The Bible:

To do this, we used one large match box and six or so small match boxes per person.  I emptied all of the matches into bags.  We now have enough matches to last for years to come:)

The kids covered their small match boxes with construction paper to look like miniature books and then slid the mini books into the larger covered match box.  This was a great visual for them to understand the relationship between books of the Bible and the Bible as a whole.

*None of these projects were my original ideas.  They all came from our curriculum:)