Review: TOS WeE-book "The Real Hummers"

First, I have to start off by staying that we love Jeannie Fulbright in this house. She is the author of the Apologia Science elementary series of books (Exploring Creation with...). I discovered these gems back when I was first starting to homeschool B. We started out with her Astronomy book (we actually did it twice - it's that good) and also covered her Botany, Zoology 1 (flying animals) & Zoology 2 (swimming animals). The only one we have not done yet is Zoology 3 (land animals). I'm planning to go through them all again with the little boys. But since this is suppose to be a review of the WeE-book I used today with the boys, I'll leave my raving of the Apologia elementary books for another post.

I was not disappointed with this little book at all. It had Jeannie's engaging writing style & it was full of fun facts about hummingbirds. I went & printed out a coloring page for the boys to work on while I read to them. I just did a quick search on Google & picked the first one that came up. The WeE-book was short, only five pages long. The end had a great resource to help you plant a "hummingbird garden" with a long list of plants that hummingbirds like to eat from. 

One of the great features I love in Jeannine's writing, and this book was no exception, was how she ties it all back to God's wonderful ability to create. There are some really neat facts about hummingbirds - including the fact that there is on plant in particular that is too deep for normal birds & insects to pollinate. Only one type of hummingbird is capable of doing it. So much for survival of the fittest!

There is also a great list of "further resources" at the end of the book with some videos listed as well as more books to read from. 

We ended this mini-science unit by checking out videos on YouTube. We watched part of this video which was neat as it did some slow-motion to show you how fast the birds can move. It also has some fun facts that come up on the screen. I watched this one but didn't show it to the boys yet. It has a nest of eggs & shows them hatching & developing over the course of 40 days. There are quite a few on there & I would suggest checking it out to see what you can find.

There is a large number of WeE-books at the TOS store. All sell for $1.95 & they are instant downloads. Some of geared toward the homeschooling mom directly but many are also like this hummingbird book - neat little units that can be done quite quickly & added in easily to your school day.