All about owls.....

After the success of our hedgehog unit it was Sweet Pea's chance to choose a topic.. and her latest obsession?
Owls.. anything owly will count.... and luckily there is no shortage of that!!

It started innocently enough with a request from Sweet Pea asking if we could see owlets.. which led us to this fantastic live feed of a Great Horned Owl nest....  we were able to watch a pair of owls, lay eggs and incubate them.  We watched two owlets hatch, get fed, grow and fly away... it was just fantastic!  Even now that they are gone, we have found a Barred Owl to watch... the three eggs are being incubated..right now!

Next step was to find a great read aloud book about owls... Owls in the Family by Farley Mowat was a perfect fit.  The kidlets both enjoyed the laugh out loud funny adventures of a couple of pet owls and thought it was great that it is based in Canada.

I had a harder time finding a good lapbook to go with this unit but was able to put one together from multiple sources and use what we wanted from each...  There were a couple that we wanted to add, so we made our own from the homeschoolshare website templates.

 Owl Babies Lapbook

Nocturnal Animals Lapbook

 

Owl Lapbook - with owl pellet dissection booklet

We watched a PBS documentary Owl Power and
some related Wild Kratts episodes (Desert Elves and Snowy Owl Invasion).

A friend of mine showed us some great owl rocks we could make!  So we made a trip down to the river where we searched for the perfect sized and shaped rocks, washed them off and got out our sharpies....

Sweet Pea drew some great owls...

Goober, on the other hand, made some hedgehog rocks!  

I took out a variety of non fiction books about owls to help us complete our lapbooks...
and left them around the house to look at!

Owl: A year in the life of North American Owls 

Owls

We have had a great owl pellet dissection app for awhile now.. the kidlets love it... they have to find an owl, gather the pellets, take them apart and identify the prey and how it fits into a food chain.  It is well worth the cost of the app..

 But of course I need the real thing sometimes!
I found a place in Calgary that sells owl pellets..........  and made an order.....

They were fantastic.... the kidlets used their booklet from the lapbook to record their observations through the dissection and the bone identification chart that came with the kit was awesome!

They both found multiple skulls in their pellets and were able to identify them on their own!

Here are the finished lapbooks...  Sweet Pea opted for an owl drawing on the front of hers...

Goober found a picture in an old magazine to cut out...

And finally to finish up our Owl unit we did some yoga to an owlet story... I just recently discovered Cosmic Kids Yoga and we are loving it!! 

This was a fantastic unit... so much fun and I'm sure we could have spent a lot more time on owls!! 

Which happened when Sweet Pea decided on an owl theme for her birthday.. check out these great snacks, cupcakes and craft!

Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia....

Saskatchewan
Flag, animal and plant colouring page
Rick Mercer at Agribition
Rick Mercer and the Saskatchewan Rough Riders
Rick Mercer RCMP depot
Wild  Kratts episode- Mystery on the Prairie - side note- the sound is a little weird on this video but still watchable!
Wild  Kratts episode- Bandito the Black Footed Ferret
Watch a video on the life cycle of a farm  and make your own bread, here is a recipe from Your Homebased Mom!

Alberta
Flag, animal and plant colouring page
Canadian Heritage Minute- Joseph Tyrrell
Rick Mercer in the Oil Sands
Rick Mercer at Elk Island National Park
Rick Mercer Canadian Finals Rodeo
Rick Mercer Calgary Zoo
Rick Mercer at West Edmonton Mall
Wild  Kratts episode- Journey to the Subnivean Zone
Draw a dinosaur- Art Hub for Kids has great tutorials or pick out a buffalo craft!

BC
Flag, animal and plant colouring page 
Canadian Heritage Minute- Emily Carr
Rick Mercer in Haida Gwaii
Rick Mercer goes Heli-logging
Rick Mercer goes snorkeling with salmon
Rick Mercer and the last railroad spike
Rick Mercer at Science World
Wild  Kratts episode- This orca likes sharks
Watch this great documentary- Wild Canada- here is the episode on youtube as well-The Wild West

Here is a reminder of how we are going about our quick geography!

As a spine we are using these two books...

Hey Canada  
                                                                                                      

The Kids Book of Canada

A good map of Canada to colour is also a must...

Here's how it goes..

1. Read about the province or territory together, talk about the provincial animals, plants, etc.  Look at the map, find major cities, water features.  Talk about friends that we might know that live there, anything we might already know.

2. Watch a couple of videos, either tourism type, major attraction or interesting event.  Rick Mercer clips are favourites :)

3. Find and colour the province or territory and label it.  Sweet Pea will also mark and label the capital city and any major water ways.

4. Add something else... printables for flags and animals... Pick an animal, watch a video, make a craft, whatever floats your boat!

Pi Day!

Happy Pi Day!!  Let's celebrate 3.14159.....

Our favourite book for this day is Sir Cumference and the Dragon of Pi...

Here is a link to the Youtube reading of the book... 

One of our favourite Youtube channels has a couple episodes all about pi, check out SciShow!

3 ways Pi can explain practically everything

Pi 'n science

We loved this worksheet and activity set from For the Love of Teaching Math...  so much fun and free to download and print!

Goober enjoyed making a Lego depiction of pi....

Sweet Pea though this cootie catcher, from Teaching is a gift blog, all about pi was math-tastic!  

Just for fun we also watched this Cyberchase episode about pi!

Finish off your day with some cheeseburger pie for dinner... and I have celiac so it is gluten free!

For dessert we had chocolate cream pie in a gluten free crust.... yum!

My kidlets wish it was pi day everyday!

All about hedgehogs!

As I continue to allow the kidlets to have more input into our projects..... I find we are studying things I never expected!  Goober was invited by a friend of Sweet Pea's to her classroom to see the class pet.... he came back with a huge grin and a new found obsession with hedgehogs.. yep.. hedgehogs!!  I thought maybe it would wear off within the week, it did not and all week I was pestered for more information... So off I went to make a whole unit... it's what I do!!

 First I hit my favourite lapbook site and found this gem.

It was wonderfully laid out with a book list and everything....  

Next I hit my local library and found all the books related to hedgehogs... non-fiction, picture books, you name it!  Goobers favourite was this one by Jan Brett... Hedgie's Surprise.

But any by Jan Brett will do.. not only does she love to draw hedgehogs, she also has a pet hedgehog and you will find one in almost all her books... so cool!  

We also found a great Youtube video of Jan Brett teaching how to draw a hedgehog...

I helped Goober a bit with his drawing... 

he got tired of putting all the v's on and wanted to colour it :)

On Christmas morning, Goober discovered a plush hedgehog sitting in his stocking! 

He loves his Hedgie... "Mom, hedgehogs are insectivores so I need some food for him!"

 What better than a little rainbow loom?!?!  

I was able to track down another Youtube video to help us make a caterpillar...

 Goober then made several more of different sizes and a couple pink worms for good measure.....

I'm pretty sure Hedgie loves them.....  

What kind of animal study would be complete without a little Sir David Attenborough?  We were unable to find anything specific about hedgehogs, so we decided to watch a BBC Life of Mammals episodes about Insect Hunters.  Goober was over the moon watching Sir David hang with the hedgehog in his garden.... it was perfect!!

I also managed to find some great mazes and word finds by doing a quick google search for hedgehog printables.... and of course no shortage of colouring pages to keep him busy while I read our latest novel aloud or when I was helping Sweet Pea with her work.

Here are a few photos of Goober's completed lapbook.. it was great practice for his printing skills and he was so very proud with the result!

 As an added bonus, I now have a resident hedgehog expert should the need ever arise!!

 Side note: we did this unit when Goober was about 6 years old...

 I think this would be a great unit for ages 5-10 :)

Big Biology Unit!

Sweet Pea really enjoyed our foray into chemistry last year and I must admit it was a great way to cover a lot of science.  It was another thing to pull the information together and figure out the best way to organize it..... Luckily I find I'm really enjoying doing it and my degree in biology may have contributed as well :o)

 

 

I'm not going to bore you with loads of links that will probably expire... but I will list our order of discovery and a couple of fantastic books we found along the way.  If you are looking for a specific resource, please leave me a message and I'll do my best to help you out!!

I needed a spine to help guide our unit study and chose this one.. Evolution Revolution.. I like that it tells the story of creation from a variety of myths and cultures and then shows when science came in and how it changed how we look at the origin of life.

I love this book...Our Family Tree.. it is a great picture book with lovely illustrations....  there is also a great timeline at the back... 

 

And what study of the origin of life doesn't need some Sir David Attenborough...

This documentary called First Life is just fantastic!  I was unable to find a DVD, so here is a link to watch it for free!

Part 1- First Life

Part 2- First Life 

As we did with our chemistry unit, we did a scientist study...  This website is so cool for making your own scientist trading cards!

First up was Aristotle and then Carl Linnaeus... because he was the coolest classifier!  At this point we also talked about taxonomy, and binomial nomenclature :)  Here are some super cool dichotomous key worksheets... we had way too much fun with some of these!

 

DNA!! Once we figured out how things had been classified, we started discussing how we know things are related... this book; Gregor Mendel, the friar who grew peas; was fantastic!

 

We also discussed Watson and Crick, and Rosalind Franklin, who together discovered the shape of DNA, which led to pipe cleaner models and an experiment to extract DNA... so cool!

The Scientific Mom has a great tutorial for the DNA extraction.

The next scientist was Charles Darwin, which I could spend a whole unit on!  My favourite picture book was One Beetle Too Many......

 

 

We watched videos, mapped the voyage of the HMS Beagle, found examples of natural selection and learned about the Galapagos islands. Our favourite documentary about Darwin was BBC's Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life.. Check it out!

We also found this book about a young girl who reads The Origin of Species and wants to become a naturalist... in the year of 1899.  The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate was a fantastic fiction read aloud for this unit!!
 

This was a great place in our unit to look at each kingdom of life in more detail.. BBC Life series was great for this!  We also took a look at prokaryotic vs eukaryotic cells, protists, animal vs plant cells and types of cycles (water, nitrogen, carbon).

 

 And how humans impact, interact and protect life...  Sweet Pea really enjoyed learning about Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring... this was a great picture book; Rachel Carson and her book that changed the world....

The final product?  A better understanding of the natural world, kidlets that pretend they are naturalists like Charles Darwin and Calpurnia Tate in the backyard, and this completed lapbook......
 How great is Sweet Pea's drawing of Darwin and his great idea!

We found most of the elements for our lapbook at Homeschoolshare, but also made some of our own!

 We all loved this unit.... looking forward to going over it again in a few years in more detail for both Sweet Pea and Goober!  Next up.... physics!