We had an awesome week with a Curious George unit study.  It all started when the kids went to a city book swap where they could exchange their old books for other kids' gently used books.  Jeremiah ended up with the complete Curious George collection in hardback.  He loves the colorful pictures and flips through the books pages at least once a day.  Here he is at the end of a long day, having fallen asleep while looking at his new favorite book.

How cute is he?  Anyway, since Jeremiah does school so much better when it involves something he's interested in, I decided to do a Curious George unit study.  Boy, was it fun.  There are so many stories to choose from, but we stuck with the original for now and I was amazed at how much could be learned from this story.

Jerry learned about foods, the weather, and other animals found in Africa where George lived.  he also colored Africa on a world map.  We made an origami yellow hat for George so Jerry could practice his spatial concepts, and we did this with a cutout of George in a strawberry basket jail as well. 

George & the Yellow Hat

George in Jail

We talked about water safety, made sure our monkeys each had their own yellow hats, worked on opposites, did color by number balloons, and talked about the people who care for Jeremiah the way the man in the yellow hat cares for George.  We also made a venn diagram comparing Jerry and George and did a compare and contrast on what George can do with his feet versus what Jerry can do with his.  To go along with that, we watched a great YouTube from a 20/20 segment about a girl named Jessica Parks who was born with no arms and has to do everything with her feet.  It tied in great.

We made a climbing George craft, a timeline of our story, counted bananas on a tree on the fridge, and played Red Light, Green Light to go along with George's traffic jam he caused while on his balloon ride.

Climbing George

Our Timeline

Counting Bananas

Red Light, Green Light

We talked about stranger danger and what Jerry should do if a stranger ever tried to take him.  He also sorted pictures of strangers and familiar people.  We practiced phone etiquette by me calling Jerry on our house phone from my cell phone and talked about when we should call 9-1-1 by playing 9-1-1 or No 9-1-1.

We played Guess Who At the Zoo to find out what other animals George might live with at the zoo.  We ended today with learning the difference between soft and hard G's and making our lapbook from our fun week with George.  Here are some pics of our completed lapbook.