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. :)

A Post For the Birds

I wanted to add a bird bath to our yard this year (and several other bird friendly features). Coincidentally, during Annabelle's last week of the Savannah habitat it suggested that we build a 'watering hole' in our own yard. That settled it....off to Menard's we went.

We bought some suet, and a couple suet feeders.
Here was our bath decision....Annabelle was convinced she was going to fill it with that little cup.
I also printed out some bird identification card and laminated them. So when a bird does actually decide to take a bath or eat (we've been unsuccessful so far) we will be able to observe and identify what kinds of birds visit our yard.
I'm hoping that they will start to come soon. I don't know if it's our placement or if it just takes longer for birds to get used to the bath, or if there is just enough food to go around right now since it's summer. I guess we'll see as time goes on. Happy blogging!

jess_hak

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

Linking up to Homeschool Creations.

Henry Huggins

We are finishing up Henry Huggins today. It was a scheduled book for our adventure reading. I must say that compared to Born Free we really enjoyed this book. Annabelle was just really able to get into the story a bit more. We did a few fun things to enhance the story and though that I would share them with you. I also wanted to share the discussion questions that I threw together to ask at the end of each chapter.

Chapter #1 - Henry and Ribs
Why couldn't Ribsy come on the bus?
Why is it important to follow the rules?

Chapter #2 - Gallons of Guppies
Why couldn't the fish be in one bowl?
Why was it hard for Henry to give away his fish?
We also picked a stuffed animal for her to give away. Then we cleaned out her fish tank.....
...poured in rocks.....
....and bought two guppies (Tommy and Chucky), who sadly did not make it longer than 2 weeks. (In the picture they are on the left side of the tank by the plant.)
Chapter #3 - Henry and the Night Crawlers
Why was Henry responsible to replace the football?
Was it good of the man to return the football?

There were a lot of fun things that could've been done with this chapter. We just didn't have the time to do it....and I don't think Annabelle would've appreciated it much. (Think fun with worms)

Chapter #4 - The Green Christmas
Why didn't Henry want to be the little boy in the play?
Did Henry have a good or a bad attitude?
Was it nice for the other kids to be teasing Henry?

In this chapter Henry gets green paint dropped on his head. We mixed blue and yellow paint to make green (kind of green...there is too much blue in it) and painted a little boy green. Then she used her finger to make green paw prints.

Chapter #5 - The Pale Pink Dog
Why did Henry want to use the bath tub indoors instead of the washtub outdoors.

This activity is super easy....we painted a pink dog. :)

Chapter #6 - Finders Keepers
What do you think will happen to Ribsy?
What boy should get to keep him?


It was pretty easy to come up with these activities for Annabelle to do (plus more that we didn't even have time to do). I think that she really enjoyed them. During the extra activities we were able to reopen our discussion of the book. It is amazing some of the conversations that came out of a simple scheduled adventure reading. Everything from the importance of pet care, to being responsible with other peoples things, to why we can't paint our brothers green. :) Really looking forward to what comes out of our next book. Happy blogging.

jess_hak