Learning by & while coloring

I've found, over the years, that if children can doodle or color while they are listening to a book, they tend not to get distracted by other things.

So, during our morning activities (where I teach all the children together schoolroom-style), I've been having the children color specific things while I'm reading our St Paul book to them.

For the first few months Allie was supposed to be learning about the human body, so I had all the children work their way through Easy Make & Learn Projects: Human Body , coloring the projects during our St Paul read-aloud and then assembling them later.

~Here is Allie next to some of her "human body" creations & our beaver wearing a "brain hat":






































We've been done with the "human body" activities for a while, so here is what we've been working on lately:

~Chloe's daily reading assignments have been from Genevieve Foster's "Augustus Caesar's World". I photocopy the pictures from the chapters she will be covering each week and she colors them during our reading time. Later, she tapes them into her notebook and writes a sentence or two explaining what the picture is about.







































~In history Kievan is studying about the colonization of the Americas. She is making maps for the different periods using "Interactive 3-D Maps: American History: Easy-to-Assemble 3-D Maps That Students Make and Manipulate to Learn Key Facts," another book by Donald Silver.




















~Allie and Ben have been working on their coloring books from "The Apostolate's Family Catechism". Here's an uncolored example (the colored ones have vanished...)