We are still hanging out with itsy bitsy mammals. We met the mole and his cousins: the Oregon mole, Hairy-tailed mole and the Star-nose mole.
(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.
With our busy schedule and Mama juggling working plus homeschooling Doo, our nature study has taken a huge hit. Doo has spontaneously gotten out her nature study journal a few times on her own but the last time we purposefully sat down somewhere to do a lesson was last February!
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.
But at least they are not rodents.
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.
Before our winter break, the last several weeks of our Animal Study covered mucho rodents. I am happy to say we are done with rodents once we start up again tomorrow.
We met:
The North American Brown Lemming
The Pine Mouse
Whew. Like I said, we are very happy to move onto other mammals for the rest of the school year.
Life has been pretty packed which has gotten in the way of blogging. Egads! I have some posts to share, hopefully sooner than later, about various things we have been doing homeschool-wise. Including making a volcano when we learned about Crete. It was a big hit.
Our last animal study brought us the resourceful beaver.
and we are still hanging out with the rodent family.
We have the Pika,
the Mountain Beaver,
the Pocket Gopher,
and the Porcupine.
This week’s animal study was brought to you by the Hoary Marmot and the Prairie Dog.
Our entire animal study this week was about the groundhog. Doo especially enjoyed the babies in the first video.
This week for our animal study we met:
This week’s animal study introduced us to tree squirrels in North America. We read chapters 4 and 5 and then took to the web to learn more.
We met:
And the last two can be found at the Grand Canyon – we will be visiting in about two months so we hope to see them!
The last video is pretty blurry but you can see the squirrels pretty well near the end.
