Walking through the Science Encyclopedias

Hunter really loves to draw.

And in the past few months, he has become quite keen on writing, too.

So we have decided to combine this along with his interest in science to create a sort of copy work / narrating activity that also involves illustration.

It started out as just reading together for leisure (from some science encyclopedias we got for $1 at a yard sale). But then I decided to go ahead and have him "narrate" what we just read (tell me what we just learned about, in his own words) and he started wanting to draw about it, too.

Which resulted in this...

The aardvark is an african mammal. It digs in dirt and scoops up ants and termit[es] with its tongue. Its scientific name is Orycteropus afer.

Yes, I realize that he misspelled termites and that, for some reason, he put "name is" after its name. But we'll work on that.

The "copy work" aspect is that I write down what he tells me, and then he in turn copies it in onto his story paper (which has unfortunately large lines, making for not too much space to write).

This has been great to work on his drawing (we have been having lessons on drawing what you see and really paying attention to the way the lines go), his comprehension and speaking skills (hence the narration part), and the copy work is to work on his spelling, punctuation, word spacing, and ideally handwriting (although he didn't exactly do his "best" handwriting here, but not too bad).

This is an activity that, if I would have assigned it to him a year and a half ago, he would have hated. But now he actually found it quite enjoyable, and is looking forward to illustrating (and narrating) the encyclopedia entries for abacus and abrasion and absolute zero (good luck on that one, right?).

"...Write this for a memorial in a book, and rehearse it in the ears of Joshua..." 

Exodus 17:14

Hunter is 5 years, 4 months old