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: 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: Chinchillas

Over Christmas break we visited a friend who had a pet chinchilla.  Oh boy the fun and learning that abounded.
First we learned that chinchillas are nocturnal, and then we learned what they eat and a little bit about them.

But the most exciting part was watching them take a bath.  They come from a very cold and dry area, so they take baths in dust.  The kids thought this was hilarious.  I wasn’t there to see it (we girls were getting breakfast and snack supplies), but I was told ALL about it for the next several days.

So, I give you the “Chinchilla dust bath.”  ENJOY!

Educating Layton has a fun food pyramid lesson complete with some printables.


The Tiger Chronicle has a fun post about penicillin and how bacteria grows.

Delightful Children’s Books has a great list of books about trees.

Have you ever learned something from someone else’s pets?  I learned a lot about chinchillas.

Science Sunday: Armadillo

Earlier this week Jeff told me he saw an armadillo as he was leaving for work wandering around our yard.  I was pretty excited, because armadillos are common to our area, but you rarely see them alive.

 

Armadillos have poor eyesight and their instinct when scared is to freeze and then jump up into the air very high to scare the predator.  That does not go well when the predator is a car, and they usually don’t survive………

So, you can imagine I was pretty excited when I saw one outside the next morning.  I got all the kids outside and we watch him run around and reviewed what we knew of armadillos.

 

Armadillos are nocturnal, that means they usually come out at night.  They can’t see very well, but can smell very well.  The bad eyesight was reinforced when we heard him bump into several things in the bushes.

 

 

 

Armadillos like to dig A LOT.  We looked at the holes in the ground he had dug last night, which you can see behind him.  I asked the kids why they dig, what are they trying to get, and they answered “bugs,” and they were right.  Armadillos eat primarily grubs and insects in the ground. 

 

When I asked how they dig, they said they have claws on their front feet like Mac (our dog) does.  He can dig tunnels like Mac tries to also.

 

armadillo moving

One thing that surprised me was how noisy he was on the sidewalk.  His claws are so long in front that they clicked rather loudly in the morning air.

And of course Batman had to pretend to be an armadillo and move just like the armadillo did…….  It was great.

Science Sunday: The Nature Center

We have an absolutely amazing nature center here in the Austin area.  If you are ever vising here I highly recommend it.

It’s calming, it’s a rescue zoo for local animals that can’t be adapted back to the wild, and the thing my kids were obsessed about recently, you can trade in your nature finds to get different ones, mainly skeletons.

Or that’s all my boys wanted.

A few weeks ago we saw a dead lizard being eaten up by a swarm of ants.  This made for a quick fascinating nature observation.  Especially when a few days later we saw that now the lizard was just a skeleton.

So, Superman quite happily scooped it up into a plastic bag and spent the next two weeks begging to go down and trade it in.

He and his brother and sister also scooped up a couple of pocketfuls full of rocks and proudly took them to the nature counter.


She took the skull out and let them observe it and talk about what they knew about the lizard.  The kids remembered it was greenish brown with some blue.  So she got out her reptile and amphibian book and found a green anole for us.  Then we found out what it was and we got to talk about it for a while.

Then came the cool part.  Or to me.



Then we started talking about the rocks and she explained about how most rocks in our area are limestone and a lot of these rocks looked like limestone.

And to make sure she pulled out an acid (HCl) and put a drop on each one.

It bubbled up just like baking soda and vinegar does.  So, over half of our rocks were limestone.

Now, according to her if I put some vinegar on limestone it will react the same way, just not as impressive.  I’m eager to find some limestone to try.


Then we headed off to take lots of pictures for our hero story, which is the subject of another post someday…….

DON'T FORGET TO ENTER MY GIVEAWAY!  Great way to encourage writing with their own personal paper.

Science Sunday: Identify that sea turtle

 

 

Yes, we’re still learning about sea turtles.  Last week was just the first part of the lesson.  Now we get into the real thing.  First I searched all over to find images of sea turtles to print out, and then ended up finding a great site, Sea Turtle Conservancy, and used their pictures of sea turtles to make our cards and identify the different types.

 

 

Then we looked at Ridley, he’s my sea turtle I got in Galveston this summer.  I could have sworn I had a picture of Princess with him from earlier, she’s trying very hard to steal him from me.

 

I posed the dilemma of what type of turtle is Ridley?

What do you think?  We debated long and hard about this.  Here are your choices: Ridley Kimp sea turtle, loggerhead turtle, green sea turtle, leatherback, Australian flatback, olive ridley, or hawksbill turtle?

 

I’ll come back and comment later with what we thought it was.  If you go to the website I linked to you can see pictures of the different types.

Science Sunday: Dentist visit

Or the one where I have to face that “My babies are growing up!”

Also known as, my boys are about to lose their first baby teeth.




The kids got to find out all sorts of stuff as we went to the dentist, I love our dentist (and that’s saying a lot because I hate going with a passion), and they do such a great job of explaining things at the kids’ level.

So, they explained all about “sugar bugs,” which is why you need to brush your teeth, and why you need to not eat too much sugary foods.

She was also able to explain to the kids why it was their mouths were hurting sometimes recently.  They got to look at x-rays of their mouths and saw how the new teeth are growing in.

Don’t you just love it when science is nice and simple?  It was such a great learning experience for everyone!

Sigh, helps if you schedule for the right time......