Monday, April 12, 2010

Expedition Australia!

"Expedition Australia"
Download n Go Series
by Amanda Bennett and The Old Schoolhouse
P.O. Box 8426, Gray, TN 37615
1-888-718-HOME
http://www.thehomeschoolmagazine.com/





Just download this ebook and head for Australia because everything's ready to go. Laid out in a five-day format, all links and activities are included for lapbooking, videos, suggested books and worksheets. Reading, spelling, vocabulary, science, geography, art, math and social studies are incorporated each day, along with a little music and fun and games. Did I mention FUN?! This Unit Study is best employed using the PDF to access all the links, an internet connection, and a printout of the ebook for student activities.
Designed for ages 4-10, older students can use it as a basis for a more detailed study, taking the science and research a bit further and supplementing grade level math. Minimal supplies are required for the lapbooking activities - glue, scissors, pencils and markers or crayons. We used staples instead of the brads for making the mini-books. I wanted to try loading it on the Itouch, to make it even more portable, but didn't get to it.


My six year old son is not very fussy with his artwork, but he did enjoy mapping out the Great Barrier reef, Canberra, Perth, the Great Victorian Desert and the Oceans surrounding the continent. Uluru Rock in particular made an impression on him, maybe because he liked to draw it. Koalas were, by far, his favorite animal of the week, and he now understands words like marsupial, aborigine, outback and constellation. He enjoyed learning how to read the thermometer and more clock-reading practice as we researched and compared times and temperatures in Australia with our own town. We also marvelled at the different stars visible in the Australian night sky as compared to what we see here in Arizona. Our nature walks took on new meaning as we compared our high-desert land with parts of the Australian outback.



The Download and Go series is the most user-friendly of the Unit Studies we have tried to date. There are links on each page for activities included in the back of the ebook, with a link from the activity back to the page you were on. There are also family fun/party ideas for an end-of-unit celebration, as well as a Certificate of Exploration. Extra study links are also included at the end of the unit. At only $7.95 for over 70 pages of fun learning, we are looking forward to trying out some of the other 15 titles in the series.

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