Homeschooling ADD Kids

                                                

 

We chose sheep for our unit study this week because kids seem to love them and also because there are people who still rely on sheep as their livelihood. In view of today’s economy many people are looking into ways to live of the land and owning sheep and/or goats really can help. They provide food (milk) and clothing (wool) and they are super-interesting creatures. Did you know that there are over 200 different kinds of sheep?

 

Lets begin our unit study and see what else we can learn!

 

Reading, Spelling, History, Art, Animal Science

If you’ve been using my unit studies for a while, you probably are already familiar with my advice on how to teach children with ADD or other learning differences how to read. If not, read our post " Tips to Teach Your Child How to Read Better ". 

 

First, find a book about sheep that fits your child’s reading level.  You might wish to purchase one from Amazon.  Here’s a list of books about sheep that you can buy online and have delivered to you.

 

If your child is very young, you might want to read the free online version of Baa Baa Blacksheep (originally written in 1880!).  Or try this other free online children’s book (1840) called The Flock of Sheep, or Familiar Explanations of Simple Facts.

 

Read one of the books that you ordered or downloaded and then talk about it. If it was a book that was just a cute story about a sheep ask your child what they thought it says about the personalities of sheep. Do they like sheep? Would they want to own a sheep?

 

Well, if you are really into the idea, you can actually adopt a sheep .  Please let us know if you do this and how it works out!

There is a lot of variety among sheep.  Here are pics of some different kinds of sheep:

 

 

 

These are some of the pictures we found online, but you may want to search for more. However never leave your child unattended to scout out pictures of anything online. When Googling something, be sure to add “for kids” or something like that. When you do find your pictures go through them and ask your child to determine what sheep he thinks best pictures the sheep you read about. Now go find your sheep! See where it lives and where it came from. Wikipedia has a section all about the different breeds. Use Pronto.com to get a printable map of the world if you don’t already have one and find the country that the sheep comes from. What is the climate in that country and how would that affect the sheep and farmers of that area?

 

Have your child draw a picture of some of the different sheep you find and have them write the type of sheep it is under each picture and the country of origin. When writing the name of the sheep have him say the name out loud and then spell the word also out load as he writes. This process allows for visual and mental recognition of the words.

 

A few more sheep facts

Female sheep are called ewes, baby sheep are called lambs, and male sheep are called rams. A group of sheep is called a flock.

 

 

They normally live to be about 8 years old, but can sometimes live to be as old as 20. Sheep usually give birth once a year and have 1-3 lambs. Lambs form strong bonds with their mothers. They can identify their mother by her bleat. Can you tell the difference? This site has some sounds that your child might find funny. Our dog loves it!

http://www.sheep.com/sheep_sounds.cfm

 

Depending on how old your child is you can teach your child the classic songs “Baa Baa Black Sheep” and “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”

 

Math, Making a Living, Reasoning

Sheep Farming (also known as Sheep husbandry)

 

Go to this article on Wikipedia for a great description of what is involved in raising sheep to sell either the sheep or their milk or fleece for a living. There is also a section on sheep shearing or clipping.  Typically each adult sheep is shorn once a year (a sheep may be said to have been "shorn" or "sheared").  Depending on the size of the farm some farmers shear up to 3000 sheep in a day!

 

 

The assignment for this section is to figure the cost of raising, owning & shearing sheep.  Now figure out how much money is made by selling the wool, or the profit in making a sweater or a blanket to sell. Write these down and get the cost and profit totals. You can add the profits of selling the milk or cheese to make this a bit more challenging as well.

 

 

 

Example:

Cost 1 sheep $20

Shearers $5

1 sheep 6 pds of wool

$ per pd $5

 

With one shearing a year how much money would you make?

 

Add the selling of milk or cheese:

1 sheep produces 1 gal milk

1 gal milk worth $6

 

Now lets say you want to just raise and sell the sheep:

1 female sheep (ewe) $20

1 male sheep (Ram) $20

1 baby sheep (Lamb) $25

 

If a female sheep has one to two sometimes even three lambs at a time, what could your profit be for the year?

 

Depending on your child’s age you can make this easy by figuring this with one sheep or for older children making it a flock of 10 etc…

 

Sheep in daily life

Do you have any wool sweaters or blankets in the house? Have your child feel it. Compare the wool to something made of cotton. Discuss the values of wool and how it keeps the sheep warm in the winter and even cool in the summer. Ask your child what they think of the texture, the purpose and the value of wool.

 

Go outside and look at grass, the main food source for sheep. Take your shoes off and walk barefoot to get a feel for it. Discuss what that is like for the sheep how they would chew it and maybe even talk about “chewing cud” (Wikipedia has some interesting information on this) This is why humans and dogs can not live on grass like cud chewers (sheep, goats, horses) do. If your child is very young, just have her run around making noise like a sheep might do.

 

 

Writing, Science, Nature

 

No true sheep farmer could live without the help of his trusty ol’ sheepdog. A sheepdog is a type of dog whose original purpose was to herd or guard the sheep. They were first trained thousands of years ago and the herder was able to get them to act on the sound of a whistle or by voice command. Many sheep dogs are now kept as domestic pets these dogs are very active and intelligent so they require both physical and mental exercise.

 

Watch the following video together:

 

 

Now ask your child how would he train a dog to do this.  Ask him or her what commands might you need to train a sheep dog?

 

Have your child write an essay about 200 words in length to describe either all that you would do with your sheepdog or an essay as if you were the sheepdog. What would a day in the life of a sheepdog be like? The essay does not have to be perfect since, after all, your child may be pretending to be a dog. Take the words that your child has trouble spelling and make them into spelling words. Rewrite them and then play catch outside while you help your child to spell these words out load again say the word spell the word. Now go back inside and have your child try to write and spell these words on his own.

 

Here’s a fun video to watch about "extreme" sheep herding:

 

 

Arts & Crafts

Many people have a potential "sheep" right in their house. People have been spinning dog hair into yarn long before the Spaniards introduced sheep to North America. Chiengora (she-an-gora), or dog yarn, is up to 80% warmer than wool, very soft, similar in appearance to Angora, and sheds water well. All you have to do is save the brushings from your dog!

 

Here’s a site with instructions on how to make dog yarn.

 

 

Art, History, Science, Math

 

Try making sheep milk cheese (feta) with your child! (click on the words "sheep milk cheese" in the previous sentences for instructions.  Make sure to use this occasion to teach measurements to your child.  Have him or her measure the ingredients.  Ask him to figure out how much of each ingredient you would have to use if you needed to double or triple the recipe (or perhaps divide it in half).  If your child doesn’t know fractions or is not skilled at adding, multiplying or dividing them, this is a great time to teach him!

 

You might prefer making pecorino cheese (similar to Romano, that you use on pasta with tomato sauce):

 

 

OR

 

…try making sheep or goat milk soap:

www.ehow.com/how_4551864_milk-soap-cold-process-method.html

 

Next unit study

The next unit study will be in two weeks, on the topic of space!  See you then!

 

5 Comments | In: math, reading, science, sheep, spelling, writing | | #

 

                                                                  

 

For the past two weeks the unit studies that appear on this blog each Monday have been about dinosaurs.  Weekly Unit Study: Dinosaurs Part 1 taught reading, writing, computer skills, graph usage, science, and art.  Weekly Unit Study: Dinosaurs Part 2 focused on teaching more reading, writing, science, and art as well as math.

 

Today we’re going to work on your child’s Internet research skills.  As we’ve mentioned before, memorization of facts is important for certain things such as multiplication tables, spelling and general knowledge of topics.  And we have physical exercises and games on this blog to help children with ADD to improve their memory.  However, even more important than memorization is that of teaching your child how to research.

 

Researching information can also help you child to develop his own ideas about things after having read over information in which there are sometimes differing opinions.  As Emerson wrote "Do not go where the path leads; rather, go where there is no path and leave a trail."

Nowadays most research is done online.  That can be a good or a bad thing, depending on whether your child knows how to use the Internet to do research.  It’s also important to keep in mind that if your child has Attention Deficit Disorder, it’s very easy for him to wander about from link to link instead of keeping focused on the subject that he is searching.

 

CAUTION: Don’t allow your child to use the Internet without your supervision.  As you well know, the Internet is full of great info, but it also has a lot of nasty sites.  Keeping the computer in a public area is highly advisable.

 

Searching for dinosaur info online

 

Rather than just looking for any information at all about dinosaurs, let’s make the research more specific by having your child look for information that answers the following questions:

 

1. What did dinosaurs eat?
2. What were some of the strangest dinosaurs?
3. What other animals were alive at the same time as dinosaurs?
4. What are the different ideas as to how dinosaurs disappeared? (We saw one theory in Weekly Unit Study: Dinosaurs Part 2, but there are others.)
5. What was the Earth like when dinosaurs lived?

 

The search engine that we are going to use is Ask.com, since it’s a search engine designed to work with full questions like the ones we have above. 

 

Once you’ve gone to the Ask.com site, show your child how to type the first question into the search engine box, and click the Search button or the Enter key on the keyboard.

 

Retrieval results can change from hour to hour, so I don’t know exactly what you will see, but generally the first results will be from paid sponsors.  Here’s what I got when I did the search on this question:

 

 

You’ll quickly notice that many of the sponsored links are not very relevant to your search.  It’s important that your child understand that usually the more relevant results (just tell him the "better" ones) appear below the sponsored links.  For example, when I scrolled down past the sponsored links, here’s what I got:

 

 

You can tell right away that the answers to the five questions we posed can be found at these links.  Like I said before, it might be that you have different websites retrieved than when I did the search.  However, the results you get should be quite relevant to your search. 

 

Ask your child to read the paragraph summaries below the first three or four links and then ask him which site he would like to visit to find more information about what dinosaurs ate.  Explain to him that even though he might find the answer right within the paragraph below the link, there is usually more information on the site itself, so it would be helpful to click on the link.

 

Once he has clicked on the link, show him how to find the answer to the question on the web page.  Sometimes the answer is right there with no other info.  Other times it’s buried within paragraphs of other information not directly related to the question which you are trying to answer. 

 

Teach your student how to scan through the paragraphs, looking for the information related to what dinosaurs eat, but without reading each word of each paragraph.  Scanning through info does not come easily to many kids, so one way to teach them how to do this is to tell them to move his eyes along the lines of text, but without reading the words.  Instead, just look for the words "eat", "eats", "ate" of "food".  Once he finds the word, ask him to read the sentence in which it appears as well as a few sentences after it until the discussion changes from talking about what dinosaurs eat to something else.

 

Now take out a notebook and dedicate a page or two to dinosaur research (just use a blank sheet of paper if you don’t have a notebook handy).  Have your child write the question "What do dinosaurs eat? at the top of the page.  Ask him to write the first answer below the question.  Tell him he cannot look at the website while doing it.  This is an excellent way to teach your child how to put info that they have researched into their own words. 

 

Since you’re not working on memory skills right now, if you’re child can’t recall what he read, tell him to read it again, but then turn the monitor away from him as he writes his answer.  If he has a very good memory, it might be that the sentences he writes don’t sound like his own and mirrors the site’s phrases too much.  If that’s the case, ask him what the sentence means, or to tell it to you "using different words".  His response should sound more like himself.  Then have him write down what he said.

 

Repeat these basic steps using each of the five questions we started with.  However, this time instead of having him scan the lines of text on the web page visually, teach him how to use Ctrl-F on the keyboard to find words on the page related to the question he is trying to answer.  This is, of course, a faster, more-logical way to research online, but having him scan the text visually will help him understand the principle behind what the browser’s Find tool does.

 

If this researching the answers to the questions takes too long or he becomes impatient, take an exercise break, a walk, or just do less questions. 

 

Writing a summary of the research

 

Teaching your child how to write a simple research paper, even if he is still very young and has strong ADD symptoms, will prove to be a valuable aid to him in many aspects of his life as he grows older, such as while pursuing further education or preparing presentations for secular work.

 

Have him read through his answers at least twice.  Now take his answers away from him, have him start with a clean sheet of paper and ask him to write an introductory paragraph that will explaining the topics that will be covered in this research paper. 

 

Next, have him write one paragraph answering each of the questions, but ask him which question he thinks should be answered first.  Tell him that he can add other paragraphs about other things he learned about dinosaurs when doing the unit studies during the two previous weeks. 

 

If he cannot remember some of the answers to the questions he researched, give him some hints without reading his sentences to him.  The purpose of this "rewrite" is so that he rearranges the sentences and paragraphs, continuing to reword his thoughts.  This is great exercise for the brain and encourages creativity.

 

When he is finished writing the paragraphs containing answers to the questions he researched and other facts that he learned while doing the dinosaur unit lesson, show him how to write a concluding paragraph that summaries what has been learned.

 

This can be a rather long, mentally exhausting process, especially for a child with Attention Deficit Disorder.  Don’t push him too hard if he is having a too tough of a time getting through it.  Instead, have him write only one paragraph and then switch to a different homeschooling task or give him a break.  Then after 15 to 20 minutes have him write another paragraph, etc.  Some kids with ADD can only handle certain tasks such as writing a page full of researched information if they constantly switch between tasks.  This is okay, as long as he eventually finishes the research project.

 

What do you think?

 

Let me know how you liked this week’s lesson.  Share some ideas on how you might have done it differently or ways we can improve future lessons!

 

Next week

 

Next Monday we’ll be using the unit study on dinosaurs to do some physical exercises and games to help improve your child’s memory in math and spelling.  See you then!

 

 

3 Comments | In: dinosaurs, reading, research skills, unit studies, writing | | #