African Savannah: Zebras and Rhinos

Another week down! One more week left in the Savannah and then we'll be moving on to Swamplands. That should be....exciting. :) We are almost done with two of our chapter books (Born Free and Henry Huggins). Annabelle's listening skills have definitely improved. I did a couple of posts to show some activities that we did to go along with the books. If you are interested in seeing those you can find them here and here. :)

I also wanted to say that these posts are not all inclusive of what we do during the week. There is also LA, Bible, and soon to be added....math. I just liked the thought of doing separate posts for these so that they don't get too long. Plus, it is easier for me to categorize and go back and look for something later if I keep them separate.

We talked about two different animals in length this week. The first being the zebra. We learned a lot about them. Annabelle surprised me when she remembered what part of the grass zebras eat (the tops). We only covered that briefly a couple weeks ago. I guess picking up weird, useless facts starts at an early age. :)

Her favorite thing about every week is making her animal craft. I was only planning on keeping them until we started the next habitat unit, but I don't think she will let me get rid of them. lol They have become her favorite toys to play with these last few weeks.
Loving that it is dry and she gets to now introduce it to the other 'animals'.
We worked hard on her notebook pages again. I love her drawing of the zebra. I tried to explain to her that zebra stripes run vertical (except for their butts and legs)....but she insisted they be horizontal. As usual the elements for this were found at Homeschool Share. I like in this particular unit they included younger children elements like other black and white animals and words that start with Zz.
She also colored the fictional story of How Zebras Got Their Stripes. She 'scribble' colored on a good portion of this story and was upset to find out that it was going in her book like this. She has come to terms with it now, but it was a really good lesson in always doing our best. It is important to learn to be proud of your work because you never know who will be seeing it. With that said I gave her the option to redo it. She opted to just tell people it wasn't her best work. lol She really doesn't like coloring all that much. :)
She was excited when she found out we would be making 2 animals this week. She enjoyed mixing our black and white paint to make a nice gray rhino.
Her rhino is a white rhino because it is nice and likes people.
We talked about two different kinds of rhinos this week: the white rhino and the black rhino. Her notebook deals with a lot of those differences. She seems to remember them pretty good. However, sometimes she calls the white rhino a gray rhino. It only makes sense right....I mean they are gray....but so are the black rhinos...right. This was a conversation that went on for a couple days. :)
She also thought it was funny that female rhinos are called cows. She said, "But it's a rhino, not a cow."
The letter in the curriculum this week was Jj. She worked really hard on putting jewels on the Jjs.
By far her prettiest craft ever (so she thinks).
She also made a jellyfish, which as she pointed out went very good with her brothers ocean theme.
She didn't want it to sting her. :)
Snapped this picture one morning of her and her posse of boys. She is showing them her notebook and teaching them about the animals. So glad we're keeping a notebook. It is such a fantastic review/learning tool.
Hope everyone else had a great week! Happy blogging.

jess_hak

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