City, City, City!

I talked a lot in the curriculum post about The Weaver Curriculum and how it is comprised of unit studies.  Some Units have one chapter and some have more then one chapter that all relate to the same unit.  We have finished Chapter 1 of Unit 1 and are on the second and final chapter currently.  I will talk more about Chapter 2 in a later post but wanted to do a quick summary of Chapter 1. 

The main idea behind Chapter 1 was Cities and Geology.  I know at first they may sound unrelated but hear me out, lol.  We started out learning about the Tower of Babel and how that was a starting point for all the civilizations of the future and the spreading out of mankind from Mt. Ararat.  This allowed for us to study maps of all sorts.  We did lessons using a US map and pinpointed where all of our family and friends lived.  We also wrote a letter to a family member in another state so Eric and Cameron be on the look out for those in the mail!  We drew maps of our own neighborhood and looked at and studied maps of our town, a neighboring town and our county.  We learned about how to read maps and even studied a map of Jerusalem during the time of Jesus. 

After looking at so many maps we learned more about the cities behind them including some about city governments, jobs of service people within cities and looking at cities in other countries and noting things that were alike and things that were different.  Many of their writing assignments for this unit were based on these things and we read tons of books including Curious George at the Police Station, Clifford Visits the Fire Station and Sponge Bob Goes to the Doctor.

As we studied cities we learned about why cities might be founded where they are and this included learning the history of our city.  Many decisions regarding city placement have to do with Geology so we studied rocks, soil and changes of the Earth.  This of course included studying Noah and the Great Flood as that had to be one of the greatest Geological events of all time.  We learned about different types of rocks, how they were formed and how they change over time.  We talked about good soil for farming and not so good soil.  We also talked about the Bible lesson of a house built on sand falling but a house built on rock standing strong.

Lastly we talked about the greatest city of them all, Heaven.  We read in Revelations about how John saw Heaven and then the kids wrote about what they thought Heaven would look like and we looked at many types of gemstones as John mentioned quite a few!  With so much time being spent to make sure I kept on top of things our first Chapter with this being my first time, I took very few pictures so sorry about that!  Here is one of Epi's picture of Heaven and a letter Landon wrote about how he thought Heaven would be.