Science Through Children's Literature

We love teaching/learning through living books and always have.  Below I talked about Art Through Children's Literature, and now I'll share some of what we are doing with Science Through Children's Literature.  The science has two levels, beginning and intermediate.  We are working on the beginning one with all, Zach for review, the rest maybe some new information.

Today, we talked about trees, using A Tree is Nice as the introduction story.  Honestly, despite this being a Caldecott Winner, I wasn't terribly impressed with this book.  The shape being tall and narrow like a tree was an interesting feature, and the illustrations (alternating color and pencil) were nice, but the vocabulary and sentence structure were bland to the extreme.  It read like one of those tortuous level 1 readers kids try out when first learning to sound out words.  Needless to say, my kids were a bit bored with this one. 

We are notebooking this year though as our note taking activity, so we all then got out the science notebooks to write down something we learned.  Lily made a beautiful picture to illustrate her coniferous/deciduous distinction in her notebook.