Yup totally clear and concise that title is… anyway!

On the suggestion of a good friend due to mass mosquito annoyance I decided I would love a bat house. How better to expedite this than to do a BAT UNIT that ends with Daddy and kids making one such thing? Yup totally being devious here! Enter the book Stellaluna. And all the resources here in. Which I will now share with you!!

First of all the book – Stellaluna… check it out HERE. Now onto the fun stuff. I managed to find a free lapbook on Homeschool Share HERE, and more helpful pages:

• Teachers Pay Teachers thanks to Promoting Success HERE
• About.com finger puppet craft HERE
• KidsSoup.com printable for counting HERE
• Classroom Fun has some resources HERE
• Little Miss Glamour Goes to Kindergarten has some helpful printables HERE
• For the pages I printed off on Education.com you can check my collection HERE
• We also used EnchantedLearning HERE
• And of course Activity Village, they are our go to place for printables HERE
• First Grade Wow has a fun printable HERE

For Halloween we really just went with the flow. Trick or treating… decorating for the season… We watched Room on the Broom of course. And of course, read the book HERE. I have a Halloween collection on Education.com HERE that you can check out. Oh and of course, Activity Village – HERE.

We had a few bat books we used for our unit!

• Bats by Michael George
• What’s Awake? Bats by Patricia Whitehouse
• We Both Read About Bats by Sindy McKay
• When I lived with Bats by Faith McNulty
• Outside and Inside Bats by Sandra Markle

I let Emanuel and Trinity assemble their lapbook as they pleased with minimal interference. It was a great wrap up on a unit they got really interested in! Seriously, there are so many interesting bats out there – our favourites were the fruit bat and the bumblebee bat.

We did a mini unit on Owls right after to continue our nocturnal animals/Halloween theme. You can check out my Education.com collection HERE. And of course, go to Activity Village for their printouts HERE. We had a few interesting books:

• National Geographic Kids Owls by Laura Marsh
• Owls by Josh Gregory
• Snowy Owls by Ruth Owen
• And a lovely story called Owl Babies by Martin Waddell

We printed out all the fun and interesting pages we could find and worked on a full on folder of interesting owl facts.

Of course all of this culminated in HALLOWEEN and COSTUMES! So enjoy the images! This year Zander was a wizard, Gavin a pirate, Emanuel a Storm Trooper (he demanded the light saber), Trinity Dorothy off of the Wizard of Oz and Miss Echo the Queen of Hearts thank to costume components from Aunty Shandai.

We trick or treated with our homeschool buddies for the first time! And did quite nicely.

All in all, a great Halloween!

 We really do enjoy celebrating Chinese New Year and this year was no exception. This is our first big unit in months as our work on Thanksgiving and Christmas was much more worksheets and stories than actual research. This is also our first unit trying a more Notebooking sort of theme. Though after working with the twins I definitely want to try and put more lapbook aspects into our notebooks – the folded little booklets and the like – to add to the look and the ease of use.

So in 2015 I am trying to over view a month which was working with the blog when I got behind instead of daily reflection. But with big units I still want to make these individual blog entries to share our resources and the like. Bear with me we LOVE covering China and Chinese New Year so there is a lot to share!!!

Links of Specific Interest:

• We had Zander choose two famous Chinese people and write a few sentences… he used a general list HERE thanks to Buzzle, and then to further our knowledge about the more contemporary individual used Wiki to learn more about basketball player Yao Ming HERE.
• 10 Good Luck Foods thanks to Chow HERE. I admit it, we did do some Wiki peeking when we found things we were not totally familiar with but I am sure you can figure that out!
• Something on the more traditional side I was assured by my experts… The Kitchen God HERE thanks to about.com. For a picture to include in our notebook we used Activity Village’s picture HERE.
• Learn more about the Lion Dance (sometimes mistakenly… ok OFTEN… called the dragon dance) with HelloKids.com HERE, and on Wiki HERE.
• We learned all about the meaning and history of the Chinese flag on the site A China Family Adventure HERE. With a little additional information HERE thanks to Facts.co.
• We get TONS of information from Activity Village. Their printables are amazing… HERE.
• For interesting landmarks we used the top 10 attractions listed on ChinaHighlights.com HERE.
• China’s phyisical geography thanks to About.com HERE.
• General country facts on Science Kids HERE.
• An excellent map on iLibrarion HERE.
• When you think of animals you inevitably come to the Giant Panda. Science Kids has a fact page HERE.
• We discussed tea and China… totally Gavin’s idea on that one! You can find 10 interesting facts about tea at the Food Network HERE. For its history and cultural connotations in regards to China you can read China Highlights HERE.
• Zander researched the couplets you put around doors during Chinese New Year. There is a great example (that we copied into our notebook) HERE thanks to China Page. And a bit more of a description and a way to purchase some for yourself HERE thanks to China Sprout.
• Of course we did a page on goats… I basically looked up goat facts and let the twins at it. You can read up on what we found HERE and HERE and HERE and HERE. Thanks to Lively Run Goat Dairy, Edelweiss Acres, One Kind and Animals by Pawnation.
• Of course we had to cover some animals found in China. Each child chose an animal and wrote a few facts for us to include along with an illustration. Trinity chose the Chinese Pink Dolphin. We used the WWF page HERE for hers. Gavin chose the Golden Monkey (Golden Snub-Nosed  Monkey) and while he just sort of wandered the zoo and such sites this is the one I found that I liked thanks to Konica Minolta HERE.
• While watching Wild China I heard mention of an amazing bridge… so of course I had to find the way to spell it and look up some OTHER bridges. Check out 4 HERE on Vision Times.
• Introduction to Buddhism for kids thanks to World Religions HERE.
• A good topography map thanks to Ilibrarian.net HERE.

Craft Ideas:

• Dragon Parade Puppet thanks to Crayola HERE.
• New Year’s Dragon paperbag puppet thanks to TeacherVision HERE.

Resources to Purchase:

• Teachers Pay Teachers has a great mini unit for K-3 gr. You can find that HERE. Super thanks to creator Emily Nutt Bynum for an amazing file that both Trinity and Emanuel enjoyed and learned from.

Books:

• The Runaway Rice Cake by Ying Chang Compestine
• The Runaway Wok by Ying Chang Compestine (this is a family favourite)
• A to Z Mysteries: The New Year Dragon Dilemma by Ron Roy
• Chinese New Year (Cultural Holidays) by Katie Marsico
• Chinese New Year (Holidays, Festivals and Celebrations) by Ann Heinrichs
• Sam and the Lucky Money by Karen Chinn (another family favourite with a great message about compassion)
• Max Celebrates Chinese New Year by Adria F. Klein (a great level reader)
• Kai-Lan’s Great Trip to China by Mickie Matheis (from the show Ni hao, Kai-Lan)
• Bringing in the New Year by Grace Lin
• A Gift by Yong Chen (great art and a wonderful story about love from a distance)
• The Dragon New Year (A Chinese Legend) by David Bouchard
• Ms. Frizzle’s Adventures: Imperial China by Joanna Cole
• New Year Traditions Around the World by Ann Malaspina
• When the Circus Came to Town by Laurence Yep
• Chinese New Year Crafts by Karen E. Bledsoe (this was our go to book for crafts this year)
• Night Sky Dragons by Mal Peet and Elspeth Graham

Animal Books (We did not use many and was mostly online with our looking but here are the ones we used):

• Pandas by Donna K. Grosvenor
• Goat (Farm Animals) by Katie Dicker
• Life on a Goat Farm by Judy Wolfman
• The Summer of Stanley by Natalie Kinsey-Warnock (a story about a family that is given a goat. Gorgeous pictures and good story)

We covered Origami this year. While commonly known as a Japanese art, it originated in China! You can check out our informational links HERE and HERE thanks to Origami with Rachel Katz and About.com and also check out the books we got to play around with:

• Folding for Fun by Didier Boursin 
• Uber Origami by Duy Nguyen
• Paper-Folding Fun by Ginger Johnson
• Dinosaur Origami by Duy Nguyen
• Easy Origami by Dokuohtei Nakano

Movies and TV Shows:

• Celebrate with Kai-Lan! a Nickelodeon Show
• Wild China Mini Series. We watched this series on Netflix. There are listings where you can purchase it. Though not new it is AMAZING in images and cultural history. A must watch if not for anything but the imagery.

Not so much because the kids needed it, but I decided to make dividers for each of the sections of sheets we had to go with our notebook project. I have confirmed these are the correct words… enjoy

• China HERE thanks to NamesOnline.org
• Book HERE thanks to a dictionary site
• Schoolwork HERE thanks to the same dictionary site
• Drawing or picture HERE thanks to above dictionary site

Hopefully I have included most of the resources we used. It was a lot of fun to take our usual China and Chinese New Year study a little further than we have in the past! Here are some pictures of our Notebook! Enjoy!

The Edmontosaurus was found… amazingly enough… near Edmonton! WOAH! Though it has also been found in the states. This duck billed dinosaur was also called Anatosaurus though the more common name is the Edmontosaurus. It is a rather interesting dinosaur as it walked on 4 legs AND 2 legs… it was a herbivore and had tons of teeth as it was constantly grinding them down. It was one of the last dinosaurs like the Triceratops and Tyrannosaurus Rex. So the Late Cretaceous period. We have an absolutely CANADIAN video to share with you about this dinosaur…eh.

We have a rather lengthy educational piece as our second video. This one runs about 12 minutes. 

And now for our links… There are actually quite a few. Emanuel specifically wanted to know how big or small the dinosaur was in comparison to us. The Animal Planet site had a great image for that HERE. They had a second more wordy article HERE. Science Kids had a rather neat visual rendition of the “beak” of our dinosaur HERE. The Alaska Museum of Natural History had a rather amazing painting HERE, did  you know that with this dinosaur we actually have impressions of its skin! So there is an idea as to what the actual skin patterns on this dinosaur looked like!!! EnchantedLearning has its fact sheet HERE. Kidsdinos.com has its usual map etc HERE. Under the name Anatosaurus we had the following links… About.com had there’s HERE. And then Prehistory.com had their article HERE. For our printable you can go to THIS link. And of course there is the Wiki article HERE. Enjoy the links! This is a rather interesting and information friendly dinosaur! 

Edmontosaurus