Transportation Unit

We just finished our first week of homeschool and with that, our first unit study. To begin the year, I decided to pick a topic that always gets Clayton's attention: TRUCKS. And picking trucks lended itself to a broader unit on types of transportation. Before we even began, I had to decide how we would go about "documenting" our work. Lapbooks are very popular among homeschoolers, but I really didn't want to deal with the storage issue that comes along with them. And after reading this post by Sheri, I decided to go with the notebooking approach instead. We will use a 10 x 10 scrapbook to keep our main work related to a unit and all other "loose" worksheets will be kept in a 3 ring binder. I will also print pictures of unit related activities and put them in the scrapbook. Everything in one spot!

So let me show you how we spent our first week!

On the bookshelf:
Farmer Dale's Red Pickup Truck by Lisa Wheeler
My Truck is Stuck by Kevin Lewis
Smash! Crash! by David Shannon
Here Comes Grandma! by Janet Lord
How Will We Get to the Beach? by Brigitte Luciani
Freight Train by Donald Crews
The Little Engine that Could by Watty Piper
Row, Row, Row Your Boat by Iza Trapani
Amazing Airplanes by Tony Mitton and Ant Parker

IPOD Playlist:
The Airplane Song by Laurie Berkner

Online Resources:

HomeschoolShare

Making Learning Fun

Enchanted Learning

First we talked about "Things That Go." We classified each mode of transportation and glued them into Clayton's notebook. As you can see, he helped out on the gluing!

Then Clayton did some Racecar prewriting practice. This activity went much smoother after I added in the sound effects!


We also talked about things that begin with "T" and he even practiced writing his t's. And we talked about colors and shapes as we put all the shapes aboard the Shape Bus.

I helped him with the first two, but he did the middle and right one all by himself. :)


We did a bit of train art. All I did was tell him if the piece went on the top or bottom and he glued them down:

And then we got to sing the ABC's as we put together the ABC Train:

He put all of these stickers in his notebook and I helped him label each of them:

And throughout the week, we had more prewriting practice:

We made a paper airplane, but after one flight, Clayton decided to wad it up and throw it like a ball instead! (Once Daddy got home a more advanced, more capable of flight plane was made).

And then on a couple of days we counted his cars and sorted them both by color and by size. (Notice he was able to sit all by himself while I took the picture!)

And then as a reward, he had to play with his remote control truck several times!