Mostly we study science by noticing something and then trying to find out about it. We take Nature walks along the horse farm fence line near our house; we make note of changes and when we find something new, we usually try to find it on Wikipedia.
Amanda at Hearts and Trees sells seasonal nature study/art study kits. We purchased the Fall and Winter kits and did some of the activities. She also has free seasonal scavenger hunt nature walk forms. These are a lot of fun for a smaller child.
Her mother, Barb (aka Harmony Art Mom) of Handbook of Nature Study began an Outdoor Hour weekly challenge and we did 5 of them.
Samuel is very interested in animals and we check out a lot of books on them, as well as visit the local zoo quite often. Some of the books we read are:
Backyard Birds, Jonathan Pike
All About Owls, Jim Arnosky
Our Animal Friends, Provenson
What’s Under the Sea (Usborne)
D’Aulaire’s Book of Animals
Buffalo Sunrise: The Story of a North American Giant, Diane Swanson
Old Mother West Wind by Thornton Burgess (we also used Wikipedia to look up our favorite animal friends in these stories)
Crinkleroot’s Animal Habitats by Jim Arnoski
“The Great Kapok Tree”
Crinkleroot’s Guide to Walking in Wild Places (Arnosky)
I Love Our Earth, by Martin and Sampson
My Spring Robin by Anne Rockwell
Starting Life Ladybug by Claire Llewellyn
One day on the way to the library, we saw two vultures scavenging on a skunk. When we got to the library, Samuel wanted to find a book on vultures. I found one by Sandra Markle that was part of a series on scavengers. We started with Vultures, and moved on to Jackals, Wolverines, Hyenas, and Tasmanian Devils. They are good living books because she writes these books about one animal of the species following it through a season or two or life.
We started a subscription to Your Big Backyard magazine, which I highly recommend.
We got a set of free posters from International Paper and studied the Leaf, Bark, and Seeds/Nuts posters. I just checked the link and didn't see these posters anymore, but they did have something called Coins for Kids with some lesson plan links.
We performed the following experiments –
Duplicate what the crow did in the fable The Crow and the Pitcher (after we read that fable)
I made color ice cubes and then we observed what happened when they melted.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment