In Our Own Backyard - a Start to our Monthly Theme

This afternoon I introduced our first theme of the year. This theme will take us all the way to November, so we will have plenty of time to explore and dig deep in (sometime literally) our local nature areas.

I chose a book called, aptly, In My Own Backyard, by Judi Kurjian. In this story, a child peers out of his bedroom window and wonders what used to be there. Before I read this, I posed this question - if you were to look out YOUR bedroom window, what can you imagine being there, say, 50 years ago? 100? The answers were varied. Some children thought that dinosaurs may have been roaming around 50 years ago (gosh, I feel old!), but others knew that dinosaurs lived much, much longer ago than that. The book I read took us though a succession of scenes and we went back through hundreds, then thousands, then millions and billions of years - from farming communities to settlers in covered wagons, Native Americans, glaciers, dinosaurs ... allllll the way back to when the earth was first formed.

Be sure to ask your child about this book - it was an eye-opener! I don't think the children will look at their backyards in the same way again!