A Peek Inside: Exploring God’s World

This is one of few resources I use “as is.” We follow the plan in Mother of Divine Grace Third Grade Syllabus to the letter. (Wait, not true, I did add in our local species cards for each of the animal classes.) This may be because I’m using it with Big Kid. He’s the one who never needs manipulatives.

The book is workbook sized.

I love the first few chapters. It’s a little basic for my third grader, but that allows me to add stuff that we like along the way. If something is too challenging, there’s no room for extra fun cause we work SO HARD just to get through an assignment.

The first chapter is on how we explore our world using senses. The little experiemnts were really fun and took no preparation. The next chapter is a light touch on how plants work. The experiments took more effort and since I have a garden, I didn’t feel pressured to provide too much hands-on experience. Chapter three, vertebrates was our favorite so far.

Invertebrates was a REALLY light touch, but we love bugs so I got out our arthropod cards and we learned our local crustaceans, insects, and arachnids (we had a timely brown recluse infestation in my bedroom too…ick!) We also used my Insect Lore models for ladybug, mantis, ant, butterfly, mealworm, and silkworm. We sorted, sequenced, identified them by touch only. Anything to make it interesting. A really little kid came over one day and he just matched the adult bug models to our picture cards.

The next section is all biomes. And the weather.

Oh, and here’s a shot of one of the “tests”. We do them orally.