Science Sunday: Canines and their relatives

 

 

We finished up our study of the canine family with a field trip to our local nature center.  I will take any excuse to go there, and this was a perfect one: observe and write down about the animals from the canine family.

We first sat outside the coyote enclosure.  This coyote was raised as a pet, so cannot be released back into the wild, it’s too acclimated.

For the two animals we observed they had to write one sentence, and draw a picture that used at least 3 colors.

Superman’s says: Coyote has pointy ears.  Tail is pointing down.

Batman wrote both on the same page, so the coyote one says: He has a black nose.

Side note: They need to work on understanding how to write on the page.  They do better at home, but for some reason every lesson I’d taught them flew out the window when we were there.

From the coyote we headed over to the Fox enclosure and spent some time observing her.  Again she was a pet that can’t be released back to the wild because of acclimation issues.  She wasn’t exciting to observe because she was asleep in the back of the cage.

Superman’s says: Red fox has red fur and they like the shade.

Side note: Notice there are still lots of letter reversals, and capital letters.  Not what I was working on for this lesson, so no corrections.

Princess: She has pointy red ears.

Batman’s said: He has red fur.

 

I was going to have them work on writing more, but I could see I was starting to lose them, so I released them to play in the water, which they happily did until I dragged them home again.

 

Let’s see what others did this week:

Each week I’m spotlighting a few posts that were shared previously.  Many posts get linked up later in the week and they don’t always get as many clicks as they deserve, so I’m trying to spotlight a few every week.

 

This particular week, I’m going to play hooky and send you to my land animals pinterest board, because I’m going to sneak away and go cuddle with my hubby………

 

 

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Science Sunday: herbivore or carnivore teeth

 

 

We’re attempting to get a head start on our land animals science for the year, and this week we learned about teeth.

 

Teeth you say?  That’s right, how can you tell whether an animal is an herbivore or a carnivore from it’s teeth.

Short answer:  Herbivores have flat teeth for grinding, and carnivores have sharp pointy teeth for ripping and tearing.

 

What about omnivores, you say?

 

They have a combination of both teeth.  Another interesting point, most carnivores don’t chew their meat, but swallow it in bite size pieces.

 

After learning all of that I printed off several pictures of “funny animal teeth” (that got the best search results).  I made sure to print off some of each type and only print a close-up of the mouth.

Then came the sorting, more sorting, and the final analysis:

Can you tell what animals I chose?

After all of this wrangling and deciding we had to see for sure what type of teeth our dog had.

And pose for pictures, you can’t forget that.  Doesn’t he look so happy to wear the Rapunzel wig?  And what do you know, he does have carnivore teeth.

 

I’m behind on commenting, I’ve spent the week enjoying our last few days before we “officially” start school.  We’ve had a playdate each day of the week, so look for your comments someday today or tomorrow.  Sorry guys.

 

 

 

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Science Sunday: Identifying footprints in the mud

A few weeks ago when the kids were playing in the mud we found some footprints, or something odd in the mud.

Which led to the discussion of who could have left that.  That’s when I came up with my brilliant idea, which might or might not of ruined one of my plastic bowls.  I made a small batch of plaster of paris and poured it over the print.

But, I’d made too much, so I wandered around the yard pouring it into anything that vaguely looked like a footprint.  About 10 minutes later, thanks to the Texas heat, they were all dried up.

After much discussion about the different molds we had, we decided one was Mac’s footprint, that mystery was solved.  Another was from a child’s tennis shoe, next one solved.  A third was the impression from digging in the mud with fingers.  The others we could never successfully identify.

Do you ever find unidentified footprints in your yard?  Later I found an alphabet animal footprint chart which would have been helpful at the time.

 

 

 

Let’s see what others did this week:

Each week I’m spotlighting a few posts that were shared previously.  Many posts get linked up later in the week and they don’t always get as many clicks as they deserve, so I’m trying to spotlight a few posts every week.

Source: homegrownlearners.com via Ticia on Pinterest

 

I love Homegrown Learners incorporation of music and science into one to make a water xylophone. 

Source: homeschooljournal-bergblog.blogspot.com via Ticia on Pinterest

All Things Beautiful shared part 3 of their homemade terrarium, I’m storing this away for when we study botany.

Source: myjoy-filledlife.blogspot.com via Ticia on Pinterest

My Joy Filled Life shared their homemade rockets to go with their astronomy studies.

 

Source: kathysclutteredmind.com via Ticia on Pinterest

Kathy’s Cluttered Mind shared their bug specimen board (no bugs were harmed in the making of it).

 

 

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Science Sunday: Is this a real animal?

 



On a recent visit to the Mayborne museum we discovered this little guy.  It cracked me up to read about him.

In case you can’t read the picture:
1.  It is related to the kangaroo, bandicoot, opossum, and wombat.

2.  The only marsupial found outside of Australia.

3.  Young are carried in the marsupium (pouch) for three months before showing their face to the world.

4.  Mate for life and are loyal to their mate.

5.  Orthlocks come out at sunset.  The Huoco Indians believed the creatures come out to view the dying sun.


6.  The orthlock is NOT to be confused with the Jackalope which everyone knows is a fraud!

The picture to the right is a jackalope.  Obviously a fake, while the orthlock is not……


So, we started discussing their opinions, is it a fake, and why?  They pretty much all agree it’s obviously a fake because no animal has both fur and feathers.  I have to say I think they’re right on that count.



I just got back in town late tonight and the post I had drafted featuring lots of people got all messed up and my brain is fried.  So I assure you there were many awesome posts this past week, but the hotel I was at last night did not let me get the post all written up because it decided it did not know "what this thing called an internet is."

Plus side, I got to go to my first ever homeschool convention and it was a LOT of fun!

Science Sunday: Shrimp

I just heard about a linky sponsored by Apologia Science, so I'm gonna link this up to Homeschool Science Show and Tell!

I’m kinda thinking I need a “grocery science” category, because as I was finishing up our science experiment for the week I realized a large majority of our science experiments come from there.

Case in point.  This week we were reading about different crustaceans, and I thought excellent let’s check out the lobsters at the store.

We had a lot of fun observing the different parts and remembering why the water is cold (keeps the lobsters complacent and from needing to eat).

I asked if we could touch the lobsters, but they’re not allowed to touch except with gloves on, and I was rather expecting that answer, but figured I’d give it a shot.



That night after dinner we explored the 6 shrimp I got after looking at the lobsters.  I considered getting some crab too (what a great excuse to get crab, right?), but the crab is already cut in half and doesn’t have the exoskeleton on it.  Kinda takes away some of the science lesson, and thus my excuse to get crab.




We went through and looked at their swimmerets, and discussed their exoskeleton, which is tough and brittle.  Then we looked at the tail, talked about it for awhile.





Jeff joined in the lesson at this point, and after having pulled the tail off one, pointed out the long thin brown thing you can see in the picture (thank goodness for zoom).  That is the shrimp’s lower intestine.  Then we talked about how the butcher (or someone else) had already taken the head off and removed most of the organs.

Let me tell you that was the most fascinating thing EVER to them.


Afterwards they filled out the lapbook portion about shrimp and drew pictures.  Oh, and they all stole Jeff’s shrimp.  Back when we were on our Christmas trip they all tried shrimp and swore they didn’t like it.  On Wednesday when I only got a little they all decided they loved it and stole all of poor Jeff’s shrimp.

Here’s a few fun ideas from this past weeks link-ups:

Relentlessly Fun, Deceptively Educational has a fun way to learn about spiders (I know my boys would love this).

All Things Beautiful did an experiment with the connection between taste and smell (FYI one of my boys has those same jammies).

Learning Ideas K-8 has a fun anemometer, homemade wind speed measurer.  I didn’t know you could make one at home.

And one last one:

The Learning Hypothesis gave us a link to the science behind play dough.

Science Sunday: Crabs and Lobsters

 

I’ve said it before, and I’ll probably mention it several more times in our science studies: Do not underestimate the value of a good field trip to the pet or grocery store.

 

We just read up about the various body parts of crabs and lobsters, so while I was out with the kids on Friday we stopped by the pet store and looked at their little brown crabs.  I was hoping for some hermit crabs, but this store didn’t have any.  You can see the crab down by Princess’ hand

 

That’s him all blown up.  It gave us a chance to look in real life and find eye stalks, his carapace, his walking legs, and his claws.  I had intended to go and check out the lobsters at the grocery store as well to compare, but the kids were not quite ready for that.

All Things Beautiful posted what happens to air when it gets cold.

 

Changed by the Maker shared about hermit crabs and has a cool video about molting (and yes I’m showing this to my kids on Monday).

 

So, do you have a favorite place to go for field trips?