Thursday, August 11, 2011

African Savannah: Elephants

We have diligently been studying elephants the last couple of weeks. We just finished up a couple activities last night and now we're done....so I thought that I would wrap it up for you. :)

The animal notebook was something that we worked on a lot. As always the wonderful elements that you will see can be found at Homeschool Share....for FREE! This is a picture of Annabelle's drawing of an elephant, and her picture that she colored.
Working hard and learning about elephant senses.
We learned about so many different, wonderful things that make elephants special.
This page focused on elephant height (seen on the left), and elephant families (on the right). The big blue square is the cover for our little elephant family (you will see what's inside it momentarily).
Annabelle measured things around the house and graphed it against the height of an elephant. I think that this helped give her a concept of how tall an elephant really is. Measuring her toy tote....
....and her stuffed animal....not even close. :)
These are the pictures that are in the little blue book in her notebook.

Our Little Elephant Family:
Annabelle elephant
Asa elephant
Silas elephant (who refuses to wear a trunk)
Mommy elephant
(Daddy elephant had his pic taken too, but asked to be excluded from the blog. lol)
We had a fun family night and made elephant ears. Yyyyuuuuummmmm!!! Annabelle thinks that they are literally elephant ears from Africa.
Then we watched The Lion King while eating them. Fun night!
We also wrapped up a couple projects during the last couple of weeks. This is her diorama of an African Savannah.

Painting
These little guys came with the curriculum. She cut them out, I laminated them and then hot glued them onto poker chips so that they can be moved around and stand on their own.
Ta-da. She actually prefers to use her little toob animals. A lot of getting burned by the hot glue gun for nothing.....oh well. :)
We also talked a lot about Honey Badgers and Honey Guide Birds. These little guys are really interesting animals! Then we made a little honey treat of our own.

Peanut Butter Honey balls.
We also did some observation practice. I went into the backyard and took pictures of things close up. I printed them out and mounted them on these little tags that we have.
I gave them to Annabelle and she had to find where they were in the yard. This was really, really, very fun. One of my favorite things so far.
Letter H was the letter of the week. Here is a really lame humming bird. lol
A collage of Happy Faces
AND a 'hairy' H. At least this project kept her busy while I was reading the very last reading of Born Free. :)

We are done with the African Savannah! Wow. Onto bigger and better things.....if you can call swamps and wetlands bigger and better. :) Happy blogging.

jess_hak

Linking up to Homeschool Creations. :)

7 comments:

  1. What fun!! I'll have to show this to Jasmine to give her an idea of the fun things we'll do next year, since she keeps asking if we'll do Hideaways then too! :D

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  2. Looks like a great time! We are going to be doing the book Alphabet Art this year with our 4yo too, but we haven't gotten to it yet. I remember making all those letters with our other DDs when we did WP AW!

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  3. Wow, what a great week! I love the elephant family and the backyard "I Spy" game. We might have to borrow that idea soon. Thanks for sharing!

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  4. What a cool idea to hot glue them onto poker chips.

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  5. So much fun- love your nature project! I'm glad you all had a great week!

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  6. This is a real treat for me. I have Annabelle here with me as I read and look at the pictures. How special is that. Thanks Jessica for being so faithful in posting these weekely blogs so that we can see and enjoy what the kids are doing and learning. Love to all the Hakala's. (Grandpa Smith) & Grandma also.

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