Listening Closely...

Learning is such a grand adventure!

Our family theme for the semester is:

ATTENTIVENESS

listening closely and watching carefully

It has been very necessary to focus on that in our house this year.  Not only are the boys in great need of working on their listening skills, but as I've alluded to before, I need help in this area too!

As a parent it has been helpful to have one area of character to focus on and I'm thankful that we have a curriculum that incorporates many different areas of study that tie into growing in this character trait!  KONOS is a unit-study curriculum that is based around character traits.  In our unit on Attentiveness, we will cover ears, sound, music, eyes, frontiersmen/trackers, native americans and birds - learning about each of these topics in a hands-on way.

Last week we were crawling thru the human ear...

(I can't draw for the life of me, but thankfully the boys don't seem to care.)

Xander enjoyed crawling through and pointing things out.  Keegan just wanted to crawl through super fast and touch everything and Treyton was on a mission to conquer and destroy.

While learning about the inner-workings of the ear were almost too challenging, it was neat to see the two older boys grasp why our outer-ear is shaped the way it is!

We grabbed a funnel from the garage and a short piece of pvc pipe.  With spray bottles in hand the boys had a race to see who could get the most water in a cup.  One had an outer ear (funnel) and the other just an ear canal.  They definitely "get" why God gave us outer ears.  They capture a whole lot more sound that just a small canal!

NOTE TO SELF: be sure and have three sets if possible, because the 1 year old likes tagging along too!  The extra squirt bottle really saved the day!