Attentiveness

Konos Unit: Attentiveness
Theme: General Attentiveness/Ears and Other Senses

Our next character trait that we will be learning about is Attentiveness. Boy, this is an area that my squirmy 2 year old and bouncy 7 year old could both improve in!

We started with a story from the Bible about Samuel and Eli. Nicholas just got a new Bible and he loves to read it as part of school.

Samuel keeps being woken up from sleep by hearing someone call his name. He keeps going to Eli and asking what he wants but Eli keeps telling him that he didn't call him. Finally Eli tells Samuel that it was the Lord calling Samuel and that the next time he hears the call, he should answer the Lord and listen to what He says. We dramatized the story and Nicholas just loved it when I played Samuel and acted totally startled by the calling.

We talked about the ear and sound. Nicholas used a dictionary and the website Dictionary.com to look up definitions to make his vocabulary cards of words related to attention, hearing, and sound.

We moved on to some materials from the library. The Magic School Bus has a great series of books that teach to children in a fun way as their magic bus shrinks down and gets inside of the craziest things. Of course, when I discovered that they have a book called, "The Magic School Bus Explores the Senses", I knew I had to get it. I also found a good book on the mechanics of the ear called, "What Happens When You Listen?".as well as a DVD called, "Physical Science for Children: All About Sound".

Nicholas The Ghost and Rachel enjoyed watching the cool demonstrations about sound on the DVD.

Nicholas immediately went to build a Lego demonstration of sound waves that ripple outward in all directions.

Here's a visual of sound coming out of his mouth....except that it would actually be much bigger if the size was determined by true volume of the sound emitted from his mouth.

I also read some younger children books about the senses to Rachel. This worked perfectly because I just learned that they are talking about the five senses at her preschool. It seems to be "the thing to do" and the beginning of the school year because that's when we covered it in our Bob Jones curriculum last year as well.

To feel sound, Nicholas felt the speaker on the TV.

But he also felt sound vibrations on his own throat.

We attempted to make our own otoscope to help us see into each other's ears. We used a small flashlight, black construction paper, scissors, and tape.

Nicholas started with making a round disc out of the black paper.

Then he cut a slit in the side of the paper and test fitted it around the lit flashlight to form a black cone. He cut of a small piece of the center (tip) of the black cone to allow the light to shine out in a directed beam.

It looks pretty cool now that it's done.

Here's the lit tip of the flashlight.

The eardrum is a light-gray color or a shiny pearly-white. Either we have unstraight ear canals or the homemade otoscope just didn't direct the light well enough because neither of us could find an ear drum when we looked in each other's ears. Of course, it was fun to just play with the otoscope too!

Stay tuned....next we are building a model of an ear!