I'd like to invite everyone to a weekly link-up hosted here on our blog. All of us have so many wonderful resources that we come across and use every week, and it would be great to link up and share our favorites! **Resources of any type are fair game...books, videos/DVDs, websites, favorite television programs, computer games, field trip ideas, ideas for using old materials in a different way...anything that has worked well for your family.** Feel free to use a post you've already written that's applicable and link it up! If you have a post to share, please link it up. If you don't have a post, it's fine to just leave a comment...and remember to check back and see what others are sharing!
I'll post "Favorite Resources" on Fridays, but the link-up will remain open through the following Thursday, so you can link any time. You can link your post below. Please include our blog button (HTML code is on our sidebar), or a text link back here, in your post. Thanks so much for linking up and sharing...I am so looking forward to reading everyone's posts!!
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We've decided that we're going to spend time this summer learning about botany. With that in mind, I started looking online for some good resources to use. Here are the results of my search:
- Oklahoma Homeschool has a free botany unit online for use by homeschoolers. This looks like a comprehensive unit study, including lots of resources for learning. I would probably pick and choose from these resources to find what we wanted to use.
- Homeschool Share has a free botany lapbook that looks interesting. It is designed to be used with The Usborne Science Encyclopedia (Usborne Internet-Linked Encyclopedia)
. We have other Usborne internet-linked encyclopedias in our home collection, but we don't own this one. I've ordered it through our library system to take a look.
- The Illinois State Museum has a wide variety of botany activities and lesson plans available online. There are some botanical illustration lessons that might be interesting, and one on Native American plant dyes that I looked through. You have to scroll through the pdfs to find the usable parts of the lesson plans...they contain information about objectives and state standards addressed, etc.
- In my search, I also came across a kids' site tied to the National Biological Information Infrastructure (I didn't even know such an organization existed!) which has games and activities for kids. The NBII has a portal for botany information.
- Another source of information for a botany study is the Outdoor Hour Challenge e-book: Garden Flowers (click the link for information and a link to buy the e-book). I bought this e-book a few weeks ago, and there are some great activities contained within it!
Now it's your turn...what's your favorite resource this week?? Does your family have any special topics that you are focusing on this summer?

