Submarine Study

So, it's been a while since we've completed a study, right?  Well, there are all sorts of excuses...holidays, life, blah, blah.  Don't fret, though, I don't think kids know how to not learn, so even when we didn't officially have a unit focus we were still reading and experiencing...and climbing trees!  Very important skill.



That's Jace's head sticking out the top of the tree.

But, over the last few weeks we've been working on getting back into the swing of our routine.  The kids were very interested in learning more about submarines, with Dada being on one and all.  When we were in Georgia we visited the submarine museum there and the kids really enjoyed it.  They even remembered some of what we saw and learned.  Love when that happens!  We intended to go to the sub museum here in Washington as part of our study but never made it.  There are excuses for that too...blah, blah, blah!  We'll get there in the next few weeks...sometime.

So, what did we do?  As always we read a lot.  Our three favorite library books were:

Submarines: Underwater Stealth, by Michael Teitelbaum

Nuclear Submariners, by Antony Loveless

Submarines, by Kevin Doyle

They had great pictures and lots of information.  And the information was broken up into short segments not long, boring paragraphs.  We also spend possibly too much time at Barnes and Noble.  Tyler loves the train table and there are lots of books to read and look through!  They had a great one there, Submarines UP Close, by Andra Serlin Abramson, with even more pictures...some at actual size! 

We also made some drawings, went and looked at the submarine monument on base (again, we looked at it during our monument study too), and made a flip book.  Here are some pictures of the kids working of our submarine fact book...

After writing this is doesn't seem like our (what turned into a) three week unit was all that meaty.  But the kids really did get a lot out of it. The reasons it took more than the original one week planed were two fold...there was a snow day and I could see how much they really wanted to read more and more.  We read each of our library books more than once and they loved it.  Jace read them on his own too.  I'm sure it helped them feel closer to Dada.  But they also learned a lot about how submarines work, the different types of submarines, what the submariners do out to sea and during off crew.  It was a great study!

(If you'd like to read about our other units...check here for a list.)