(No video for the Oregon mole).

Doo’s favorite was by far the Star-nosed mole. She waited impatiently to watch this video while we read up and watched the other little guys first.

A lot of this has been review for Doo.  In fact, a lot of Start Up Science has been review for her.  I don’t think this has been a bad thing, though.  It’s solidifying some of this knowledge for her.  I am very glad I paired the workbooks with library readings because otherwise it would have been much too little for her.  We will finish out our science plan for this year and then go into something a bit meatier and more hands on for second grade.  Right now I am mulling over Delta Education’s Space Science Cluster.

In Math, we have been covering time the last two weeks.  Doo has grasped this pretty easily.

Once we finish up with Math Mammoth’s first grade, which we have 3 chapters left, I am mulling over changing her to Teaching Textbooks.  We would still use the Math Mammoth worksheets from time to time but I really like how interactive this program is.  Doo and I tried it out before Christmas and she loved it.  I definitely think we will use it come second grade, I just haven’t decided if we should start once we finish first grade Math Mammoth (just 2-3 months left of that I am guessing).  Hmmmm.

I forget if I mentioned here that this next half of the year we decided to not participate in our Tuesday homeschool co-op.  Wonderful co-op and people but we needed a weekday where we could just do our own thing like hang out at a park and do lessons, go on a field trip, etc…  We have always had that until this Fall and it was deeply missed.

So yesterday we headed to a large, local park with a man-made lake and enjoyed watching the ducks, cormorants and other birds.  Doo decided to draw a Brandt’s Cormorant (at least that’s what we figured it was after consulting our nature guide).  We had watched one diving and throwing up little fish and gobbling them down.  Quite entertaining.

We also read our Thornton Burgess book for our animal study as well and were visited by a Common Grackle.  I am pretty sure he was convinced we were going to feed him because he hung out with us for a long time, even when Doo walked up close to him.  We had no goodies, unfortunately.

We met some more itsy bitsy mammals this week.  The Long-tailed Shrew (above), the American Short-Tailed Shrew (below) and the Marsh Shrew.

So, different from rodents but I look forward to learning about some bigger animals. No luck next week, though, as we are moving onto moles.

We met:

The Muskrat

The Brown Rat

The Cotton Rat

The Wood Rat

The Kangaroo Rat

The Wood Mouse

The Meadow Vole

The Banded Lemming

The North American Brown Lemming

The Meadow Jumping Mouse

video

The Pine Mouse

The Red-Backed Mouse

California Red Tree Mouse

Northern Rock Mouse

Desert Pocket Mouse

Spiny Pocket Mouse

House Mouse

Grasshopper Mouse

Whew.  Like I said, we are very happy to move onto other mammals for the rest of the school year.

I’ve been on vacation from work for a week now and have not made any of the catch-up posts that I had planned.  Whoops.  I do need to at least catch up on our animal study so that should happen in the next few days.

Happy 2012!

Our trip was a lot of fun.  We’ve been right back to lessons and classes this week.  I look forward to our two weeks off at Christmas time – we need a rest!

Behind in posts as usual but right now we are off to the Grand Canyon!  For those who celebrate, have a great holiday!

We also made a little volcano.  We were short on time so we just used construction paper for the volcano.  Doo loved this project.

Our last animal study brought us the resourceful beaver.