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Monday, November 30, 2020

Animal Crafts

Malachi (my oldest student this year…7th grade) had a group math and chemistry class once a week, so we used the days he was gone as our craft days. The other children love cutting, coloring, pasting…all those types of activities…and Malachi finds them somewhat beneath him (ha!), so this worked out perfectly. He did join us for a few of these, though!
This frog life cycle craft was pretty fun, though it was mostly just cutting and gluing. (Good practice for Teddy, not quite as fun for the older girls.) https://www.easypeasyandfun.com/3d-frog-life-cycle-craft/ There were lots of cute ideas for similar crafts, such as this one:
This chameleon painting activity was quite fun. You paint the plate with swirling colors, then put a cut-out chameleon on top and turn the plate to change his colors. The kids loved it. Instructions are here:
We made these cards near Christmastime and used them for some of our Light the World service…penguins are so cute for winter! Also they're Daisy's favorite animal. I chose mostly crafts that had to do with the children's favorites. You don't really even need a template for this card (it's just the basic "beak" or "mouth" pop-up) but here is one: https://www.easypeasyandfun.com/penguin-pop-up-card-template/
Malachi made an owl instead
These page-corner bookmarks are easy and fun to make. We made ours into pigs, but you can really make them into any animal (Teddy made a bunny). Here's a basic tutorial:  
The older children are pretty good at sewing simple projects. This was a fun one. We made these little owl handwarmers for all the kids in Sam's and my church class, too (we teach the 9-10 year olds). You fill them with rice and then put them in the microwave for a few seconds to warm them up. You can find some instructions here https://craftyourhappiness.com/2014/12/22/quick-owl-hand-warmers/. If you use fleece, you don't need to finish the seams or turn them inside out or anything.
We made a few penguins too!
This craft was really fun because a.) my kids LOVE using Sharpies, which are usually forbidden, and b.) it's just fun to color on plastic sheet protectors! And the results were really pretty.
I had a bunch of animal stickers, so this was just a classification activity. Stickers are always fun.
One night for Family Night we played a game where everyone had to draw a picture making a case for which animal is "the best animal." It was cute to see what everyone came up with.
Cute and…weird. (Seb.)
Love Junie's pigs! Good reasoning too. Snuggly babies DO qualify animals for greatness!
Teddy's cute cute bunnies.
The written word is Malachi's forte
I love the penguin refusing the waiter's food :)
But I think Goldie's might have been the best. Her reasons that elephants are the best animal?

• Strongest anaml
• Biggist land anaml
• Eats the most food I know.
• Dusint run away
• Dus not leve babyes
• Its the gentlest anaml
• Can paint
• Ar not carnarvors

Reading all that, can anyone disagree? I think not.

Monday, November 16, 2020

Animal Kingdom Homeschool Unit

Click to enlarge and make this look less blurry!
 

This was a long unit! And very wide-ranging! We have talked about a lot of specific animals before, and some larger groups:

…but this was a little different because we were able to cover taxonomy and learn some organizing principles about the various groups. It was kind of nice to pull way out and do that overview to get the big picture. 


Due to remarkably good planning (hee hee) we were talking about classification soon after Halloween, which naturally led us to do a classification activity with the children's Halloween candy. They saw that there are many useful ways of dividing up, sorting, and labeling the same items!
We divided this unit up into Invertebrates, Reptiles, Amphibians, Fish, Birds, and Mammals. We also covered Habitats, Predators and Prey/Food Webs, Adaptations, Life Cycles, and Animal Families.

We loved this movie called Octopus: Making Contact (and octopuses are our new favorite animal!)  

I also read this book The Soul of an Octopus (super interesting), and Sam and I watched and really liked this movie (My Octopus Teacher) even though it looked at first like it would be very boring :)

LOTS of fun books available for this unit…you really could fill up a whole year! And we did a lot of crafts too, which I will link to in a separate post.

Monday, September 7, 2020

Polished Agate from Brian Head

We gathered some beautiful agate at a site near Brian Head (up the canyon from Cedar City). It polished beautifully—maybe some of the best rocks we've polished yet!
The same rocks, after successive stages of polishing/tumbling