My older daughter has a lot of work daily while my younger daughter has fewer things to do for school. After we finish classwork, we are studying different animals or anything she wants to study about the world around us. She loves elephants so we decided to study them. A lot of the zoos are having classes online where they describe animals, since so many people are at home. For some of these steps, I was the scribe and my daughter had to read or watch a video to answer the questions. She isn't a huge fan of writing so I only make her write some of the facts. Or I start the sentence and she has to finish writing a few words at the end. If you do this activity and your child is young, modify it to meet their needs.
Day 1 - We talked about what we knew (or think we know) about elephants.
Day 2 - Next, we talked about questions that we have about elephants. There were a lot of questions. For some of the questions, we looked at what we knew and then I asked my daughter why. For example, we know elephants are wrinkly, but why? Is there a purpose? Which led her to ask - Why do elephants have big ears?
Day 3 - We watched some videos about elephants from the zoo. We were able to answer some of our questions, but not all of them. Learning some facts also gave us a lot more questions. We looked at videos from the Cleveland Zoo (link at the bottom). You may want to check out other zoos and see if they have other facts. Plus there are tons of videos and articles on other websites too. National Geographic Kids is a good resource. I was the scribe for this part. My daughter would tell me what she was learning. This is okay - don't think you have to make your child write everything, unless they love to write! :) They are learning by reading the facts and practicing comprehension skills by finding answers to their questions. Cleveland Zoo: https://resourcelibrary.clemetzoo.com/Animal/Details
More interesting facts -
Day 4 - More questions & finding more answers - We also learned that there are two types of elephants, the African & Asian. We decided to compare & contrast the two types and we made a chart. Since we had specific questions, my daughter used the microphone feature in our browser to find answers for our questions.
Day 5 - We created documents to show what we have learned. Since we are social distancing, we showed family members when we did video chats. Sometimes video chatting with kids gets a little silly. They like to make faces at the camera! haha! So this helps us have something constructive to talk about. This is important step - to communicate to others what was learned.
I found some images online of an elephant and thought it would be fun to put the facts on top of it. We did this one in Google slides, since that allowed us to put text on top of the image. I've listed the link to the images we used. She really liked the cursive font! And she typed all of it. She was very excited to type it.
Since we compared the Asian and African elephants, we found an image of the two together and wrote facts under the pictures. This document was made in Google docs since it we needed the paper to be portrait instead of landscape mode.
My daughter has decided she wants to study huskies next. What will you study??