BIO-- The Year of Life

Anyone who has taken my Unit Studies class knows that I like to carefully and prayerfully choose a theme for each school year and tie our units into that theme. This year's theme is BIO.

The theme of BIO lends itself to so much! I am really excited. We will be studying Biology, picking up/continuing with the subcategory of Ecology inside that, adding some Botany, and incorporating Health and Nutrition (which will include cooking for my youngest) and Anatomy. While I will do this on a higher level for my high school-aged kids, it will be Life Science for my youngest; this allows us to be learning about the same things and doing many things together while tailoring certain assignments and experiences to individuals at each level.

We'll also be doing a lot with biographies. I have started a Biography Club including some other homeschooled youth for one thing. We'll be incorporating Family History for another.

Creative Writing is another focus this year, and believe it or not, I've tied that into our year of life as well. (More on that in another post.)

Last but certainly not least, we are learning more about the Giver of Life and the way to pattern our lives after his by participating in the Godly Characteristics Series, and we are spending a lot of time learning about the Tree of Life and the path in this life that leads to Eternal Life.

Here are a few things from our first week. (Some other things will get separate, more detailed posts.)

We of course began with the root bio. Each of the kids had to find 25 words that contained the root and write down the definitions. Using words from their lists and, adding some others, I created some Bio Vocabulary Cards. Then individually they matched words to definitions, I went over additional root words and prefixes/suffixes for being word detectives, and then over the course of a few days they continued to match and rematch until they could get 100% correct.  After that we played Memory with the cards.  Here are the cards I created. (Hopefully the link above will take you to a downloadable set you can use. If it doesn't work <sigh> I'll keep trying to get it figured out.)

We did another whole-brained project, each child choosing what they wanted to draw to represent BIO:

We began a biographical writing series of my own creation. The first two assignments are below. (The first one includes a photo of me; I personalized these for each of us.) These writing assignments are meant to be introspective, journalistic and biographical, and the topic word is chosen based on things we are learning about in our other studies.