Week 10: The Study of Life

One of the activities that inspired our “Animal Unit Study” was the Turtle bread.  I ran across this recipe online, and when I saw how cute it was, I immediately started planning for the animal unit study.  We took a bit of a shortcut with the recipe, in that, we bought bread dough from the grocery store instead of making our own.  Here are some pictures of their Turtle bread:

One of the animal topics we learned about was Owls.  I wish I had had the foresight to have purchased an owl pellet for the boys to dissect for this topic.  Maybe we’ll do a more in-depth owl study later on.  As it was, I gave them “general” information about owls (how they hunt, what they hunt, how many species of owls there are, etc.).  Then we made snowy owl masks:

Ty didn’t like the owl mask activity, and he refused to put the mask on.  So you only get to see Cam with the mask.  He didn’t like the way the feathers tickled his face, so the mask didn’t stay on very long.

We finished up our Animal Unit Study with a planned field trip to the Imaginarium.  This month’s Homeschooling Event at the Imaginarium was ‘Biology’.  The classroom was packed full, so starting next month, there will be TWO classes – Tuesdays will be for K5-2nd grade, and Wednesdays will be for 3rd grade and up.  This will actually work out better for all involved, I think.

I ended up forgetting my camera the day we went to the Imaginarium.  I was so irritated!  I was so worried about making sure the boys had a snack for the day, that I completely walked out the door and left the camera.  Thank God for cell phones, eh?  My cell phone has a camera. 

One of the first activities that the boys had to do was to look at an onion skin under the microscope.  Unfortunately, I didn’t discover my cell phone camera in time to take a picture of them actually doing the activity (plus, I was helping them to focus the microscope).  So…you have pictures of the re-enactment instead! 

When I first discovered I had forgotten my camera, the boys actually cheered and high-fived each other.  Ok, so they didn’t high-five each other, but they did cheer.  But then….I pulled out my cell phone/camera.  You can see how thrilled they were by this:

More pics from the Imaginarium:

One of the experiments that the Imaginarium teachers gave us to try at home was to buy white carnations, and put them in colored water to see what would happen.  So we did:

Cam chose blue water, and Ty chose orange water.  This was the result after 24 hours:

Ty had an activity in his math class that called for making homemade orange juice.  Since I didn’t own a reamer, I had to purchase one for this activity.  However, I’m really glad I did because I had forgotten how delicious homemade orange juice is!  YUM!

In Cam’s Language Arts class, he had to make an airplane out of meat trays.  We didn’t have a meat tray large enough, so we had to scale the model down a bit, but here was the end result:

Ty’s Snack of the Week was “Pigs in a Blanket”.  We did snack of the week for lunch.  Cam wanted his hot dogs small, so we cut his smaller than Ty’s.

We started our Halloween Unit Study on Thursday, but I’ll wait unit next week before I post about that.  So far, we’re still learning about the origins of Halloween, and the five parts of a scary story.  Wait until you read the scary stories the boys came up with!  LOL  Next week will be full of LOTS of Halloween crafts and fun, and our field trip will be to a Pumpkin Patch to pick out a pumpkin!