A Report By Our 3rd Grader

The two younger girls have been working their way through the Apologia Swimming Creatures science program this year with our co-op.  We have finished all the reading and the girls final project is to do a report on one of the swimming creatures we learned about this year.  It fell at the perfect time because Peanut had been learning how to write a report with our IEW writing program.

Sweet Baby did not do IEW with us this year, we tried it for a couple days, but it became apparent that she was not able to sit through the video lessons. So, we have been using a much lighter program for our 3rd grader.  I like the program we are using  but it does not cover report writing so I had to come up with a way to keep it simple for her.  She chose sharks so we checked out a couple books from the library.

I had her choose a couple interesting topics in the books and using a 4x6 note card, she wrote one fact on each card and the topic was placed at the top of the card.  Her topics of choice were:  teeth, body, food and uses for sharks.

After she wrote her bits of information on each card she took the cards and sorted them according to similar topics.  Here she is making her piles. (By the way, I didn't realize how colorful her outfit was, of course it is our school uniform of pj's and a robe, until I looked at this picture!)
 

After she made her piles we talked about paragraphs having the same ideas in them.  We sat down and then looked at her piles according to individual ideas.  We laid out each card and she ordered them according to which idea logically came first, next, etc.

 

After she got them in an order she approved of, I had her number the cards (just in case they got separated).

 

Next week we will move on to writing one paragraph at a time.