It's the beginning of August (in a few more hours) and we're back from our crazy Florida vacation so it's time to start getting back to a somewhat regular school-ish schedule.
Our local zoo has just completed a new giraffe encounter area and zoo members (us!) can feed a giraffe for free through Sunday so I'm putting together a mini unit for Thursday, zoo visit on Friday, and art project for Monday.
*Note: Other websites previously listed no longer valid.
We'll use the websites above and internet searches to research the foldables on pages 8 (Baby Giraffe Facts) and 17 (other giraffe facts) of the lapbook at http://www.homeschoolshare.com/giraffes.php.
Spring is in full bloom here – just ask my allergies – so it is a perfect time to do a unit on butterflies! Our local zoo has a beautiful butterfly garden exhibit that should be open and make a great addition to our unit.
Monday
Introduction video – The Story of the Butterfly (Amazon Prime). We’ve discussed butterflies and their life cycle before but videos are always welcome for breaking into a subject.
Library Trip – We have books due (and we’re out of milk) so we’ll take a quick trip to the library (and grocery) for our books for the week. (See resource list below.)
Monarchs and migration – PBS NOVA special & Migration library book
Write reports on chosen butterfly (rough draft & final draft on butterfly lined paper. (Mine is from a book of reproducible papers I picked up a consignment sale. Free versions online here.)
Niagara Falls A couple of fiction books from the library to go along with our unit. We’ll use the Power of Speech worksheet from this TPT freebie to discuss why authors use certain dialogue for their characters and what character traits we can infer from their speech.
Also no longer available and I can’t find a good replacement for the same skill. But you could work on any skill with your available fiction books or just discuss the power of dialogue on characterization.
We’ll take a virtual field trip to Niagara Falls and a few local waterfalls via Google Earth and write about it afterward.
Hydroelectricity
A great library book – How Does a Waterfall become Electricity? – will be the basis for our science portion of this unit. We’ll use a portion of the non-fiction text to identify the main idea and supporting details of a passage/chapter.
Norris Dam State Park is about 30 minutes north of us. As we were finishing up our lesson on Thursday the news reported that the Dam would be spilling water to lower lake levels. It was such a perfect fit that we took a picnic lunch and headed out the next morning. We stopped at three different observation points and took pictures and got a real feel of the power of the water. The kids saw the size of the powerhouse and the transformers, just like we had read about! While there were quite a few spectators at the dam viewing sites, our picnic area was empty and beautiful! We also visited the Old Grist Mill, watching how the water moved the wheel and then going inside to see the gears moving. The Lenoir Museum was also interesting and educational. The kids enjoyed seeing, touching and even using some the of the tools used “a long, long time ago”, as the kids put it. Here are some pictures from our trip!
In preparation for our field trip to The Lost Sea this week we're studying all about caves! First up was a "what do we know about caves?" brainstorming activity. Brainstorming is not a very popular activity around here for some reason. It seems to go much smoother when we use a word cloud generator and I do the typing of the ideas. Then we tinkered with the design of our wordle until everyone liked it and came up with the image above.
Our main text for this Caves Unit Study is from the USGS and is designed for grades K-3 (get it here). It's a tremendous resource and the story is very engaging for my kids who love reading adventures and mysteries. It is very text-heavy so I transferred the pdfs to my iPad and am reading them to the kids. At certain points I'll stop and ask them to predict what might happen next. We covered lessons 1 & 2 on the first day, using some, but not all, of the suggested follow-up activities. We created a 3-part foldable to remember the differences between troglobites, trogloxenes, and troglophiles. We also started decorating lapbooks for the unit.
Day 2 I have planned to help my mom around her house so I've got some independent work for the kids lined up for after we read lesson 3 together. Today is all about bats! After reading the story we'll practice Spanish directional words together with this little book from TPT. Then we'll review what we learned yesterday about water creating caves through erosion with a fun activity using sugar cubes and clay. (Note: The original link no longer available. This activity from the American Chemical Society is very similar to what we did.)
EDIT 5-1-13 - We actually changed this experiment up a bit. I demoed wrapping the sugar in the clay and each of the kids then made their own, so we ended up with 3 "caves". We applied water to the sugar in different ways to see how different conditions would affect the rate of erosion. Cave 1 was placed in a shallow bowl of water to simulate a cave lake. Cave 2 was misted with water to simulate slow erosion from rain water. Cave 3 had water poured directly onto the sugar to simulate a continuous flowing river.
Lesson 4 deals with stalactites and stalagmites. We'll try this experiment from TLC's How Stuff Works to create our own versions. We'll also talk about cave preservation and why caves are important and do a writing activity about our field trip.
Lesson 5 talks about cave paintings. We'll look at images of cave paintings and then create our own "cave" paintings on the huge rocks in our backyard using chalk and inspiration from the infographic here.
The Iditarod Sled Dog race stars March 2nd. We’ll be including some fun projects about the race & dogs in general in the week before and the 10-17 days the race lasts, or until we lose interest, whichever happens first.
Iditarod: Math, Science & Literacy Activites – Originally a free resource shared on TPT. I can’t find the creator or packet online any more. If this is your resource and you’d like it removed or the link updated to your current site, please drop a comment below.
IditaNature is a fun way to encourage outdoor play while learning about the amazing Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. From March 3rd to March 17th, 2012 children are each challenged to play outside for 1,150 minutes, while the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race is underway.
TPT: I Wonder Questions – Originally a free resource shared on TPT. I can’t find the creator or packet online any more. If this is your resource and you’d like it removed or the link updated to your current site, please drop a comment below.
Math:
Scale – Translate real world measurements (race is about 1000 miles) to a scale that will fit on a large poster. Elementary math & logic problems
