Nature Study Club Post 12

Spiders, Slugs and Worms! That is what we have been studying for science in the last couple of weeks.  Here are some pics from our Nature Study Club!

 We visited spider webs all over our backyard, we wanted to see if the spider would come out if it sensed motion in the web... they came out every time! I bet she was disappointed we were not lunch.

 We looked for different types of webs; sheet web, orb web and tangled webs... we think this is a sheet web.

 Slugs, we found a ton of them near our trees, they like wet places were there's lots of leaves... I wanted to pour salt on all of them.... after observing them for a bout 20 minutes we did just that!

Worms.. my faves! I never knew how beneficial they are to the soil.... we had a good amount which means we have good soil.. who knew!!?!?!

Nature Study Club Post 11

Even though school is over learning never stops... the kids found these leaves with butterfly eggs on them... we are looking forward to our new friends this summer. Hopefully we'll be able to find a couple of caterpillars and watch them transform into butterflies!


We also have a pic of a squirrel visiting our deck feeder, he was so cute eating the bird seeds... A9 was not amused!

Nature Study Club Post 10 Spring is Here!

Spring is here and that means lots of nature study for us! We have been visited by so many different critters in the last few weeks. I will post all of the pics we've taken in the last two weeks.

Our tree is finally blooming, this is the only time of year it blooms so I really wanted to take a pic of how beautiful it looks!

My favorite bird, the cardinal and the female cardinal! The visit all the time but they scare so easily... they are starting to get used to us.. I hope!

I finally got a pic of the very elusive chickadee, he never stays at the feeder long... but I got him that time!

The house finches are always around, the truth is we are not sure if they are house or purple finches, A9 says house, so I guess that's what they are!

The mourning doves are always around as well, they have no problems being near us!

The robins, of course they are around all year!

We had another visitor to our feeders... a squirrel.. this little guy is very brave!

The Mallards visited us during a rain storm!

This is a male cowbird... they are pretty cute!

This is the female cowbird.

We found an egg sack on one of our bushes!

I have no clue what type of egg sack this is, praying mantis maybe!!

This afternoon we found a groundhog on our neighbors yard, turns out they have been trying to catch him for a couple of days now. Well, they got him!

No worries though, they are going to take him to the woods and release him there.

These guys are always around, the grackles.

One more pic of the groundhog before they take him away, we feed him some apple slices.

One last pic of my fave... the cardinal!

We keep seeing a blue heron, I'm trying very hard to get a pic. I love watching birds from my deck, I love hearing their songs. I will try to get more pics soon!

Nature Study Club Post 9

Continuing with the flying creatures of the fifth day theme, the kids got to build and paint a bird feeder yesterday for nature study.
I found the feeder at Michaels' two summers ago. All we need it to do was put it together using a hot glue gun and a few nails, I did that part. The kids painted the feeder and added the seeds to it.
We wanted it close to the house to give us a chance to see the birds closer but so far no birds have come, maybe we will move it to the smaller tree in our yard. We already have two ground feeders there.
Our first feeders, there is a dark eyed Junco eating the seeds, that's all we get, sometimes we'll get a male and female Cardinal and once we saw two Blue jays. We need to buy different types of seeds to attract different types of birds.

Last Science Project of 2010

Today we finished our last science project from the Zoology 1 book. The kids were supposed to create a fossil of a pterosaurs, an egg with one coming out of it.

We needed clay, plaster of Paris a real egg of course and some tea to help make the "fossil" look older.

I think we did pretty good, I know the kids were really trying to make it look like the one in the book, but I think it ended up looking more like a flower coming out of an egg than a pterosaurs.. ha ha!!
The plaster kept breaking up, either I made it too thin or we didn't wait long enough before we started applying the tea water to make it darker looking.
We had a good time doing it and that's what matters, plus the kids have a better understanding of what a fossil is and the job a lot of scientists have of finding them and trying to figure out information about it based on the fossil. A hard job to do!

Next spring we will get to do the rest of the projects we were unable to do due to the cold weather. I think there's about 4 or 5 of them left. A couple that have to do with insects and a couple of bird ones.

Nature Study Club Post 8

This morning as we were doing school the dogs needed to go outside, when I was letting them back in I noticed this bird in our backyard, well the neighbor's backyard....It was a Cooper's Hawk according to my bird expert daughter, we grabbed the binoculars and took a closer look. The bird was beautiful!! It was a juvenile hawk, not a full grown adult. Our bird feeders are now full of Dark eyed Juncos and we think he was scoping them out for a quick lunch, of course the Juncos were nowhere to be seen... as soon as the hawk left they all came back!It flew to the other side of the backyard and then left. What a beauty!! The PA bird's field guide also showed another hawk that looked a lot like this one, the red tail hawk, but we know it was a Cooper's hawk because it's tail was dark, not red.

Nature Study Club Post 7

Remember Toni the black swallowtail caterpillar, the one that was supposed to be overwintering? Well, apparently we forgot to put him in a cold location so that he could in fact overwinter till the spring. We kept it upstairs in the living room and of course the colder it got outside the warmer it got inside.... and Toni emerged from his cocoon early.... much earlier than we had anticipated!

Here's Toni as a caterpillar!
Here he is inside his cocoon overwintering.... or so we thought!
Here is Toni as a beautiful Black Swallowtail butterfly!
He stayed in A8's room, because she keeps it nice and warm and we gave him an orange and lost of sugar water in a cotton ball for it to eat!
He emerged from his cocoon the Sunday before my surgery, he lived about 10 days. No females for him to mate with, he kept looking at the sun through A8's window but it was too cold outside for us to release him. We made him as comfortable as we could....
Thanks for sharing your beauty with us Toni!

Nature Study Club Post 6

Nests! For Zoology 1 one of the projects is to build your own bird nest. Here is a pic of the nest A8 build all by herself. I think she did a great job!
She used lint, grass, mud, sticks, dry leaves... and some other stuff she found outside. She had a great time building it!
She was hoping to save it till spring and have a real bird use it, but I don't think there's any way to let birds know, "hey! we have a nest already built for you":)

Nature Study Club Post 5

On Friday we had our fifth nature study club, inside our house!! That was the morning we discovered our Monarch butterfly had come out of her chrysalis! The day before the chrysalis looked like this....As you can see, the chrysalis is now looking clear and we can see the butterfly's wings through it! We knew it wouldn't be long before she would be coming out... we had no idea just how fast that was going to happened.

Early the next morning she was out.. DH did not notice anything unusual so this must have happened between 7 - 8 am. I was up at 8 but did not go into the living room, where we had the habitat, A8 on the other hand went straight to it and that's when she saw this...We spent the WHOLE morning just looking at her... taking lots of pics! A8 was convinced she was a girl ( we later found out she was not!) so she called her Crissy!

She was so beautiful! She had no problems letting us hold her. She did not fly or eat at anytime. Later in the day she started to flex her wingsThat's when we noticed she was actually a he.. ha ha!!! Yep, those two black dots at the end of the wings means Crissy is a male butterfly.. so he is Chris after all...

After he started to flex his wings we knew it was time to let him go... we have birds in our house and we were concerned that he would fly right into the cage and the birds, not knowing any better would have him for a snack :)

We went outside when it was nice and warm. He flew into a bush and came right back to A8's hair.. A8 took it as a sign that he wanted to come back to us.. noooo... I told her, he just needs more practice.. the second time he flew even higher to one of the trees in the backyard... from there he kept going into the nursery. He got better and better at it.

From what we've learned about Monarch butterflies, he will be migrating to Mexico and then come back in the spring to mate and then die.Thank you Chris caterpillar and Chris butterfly for sharing your complete metamorphosis with us! Thank you Zoology 1 lesson 14 for all the info we needed... We cannot wait to see Toni the caterpillar as a beautiful Toni butterfly in the spring, since it's pretty obvious she will be overwintering.... You are next!

Apologia Science

This is our first year using Apologia Science. We are using Exploring Creation with Zoology: Flying Creature of the Fifth Day.

This curriculum is for K to 6th grade. It is not dumbed down in any way, but it's also very fun to read a loud to the kids. The plan was to include X6, however Lesson 1 was a bit long and wordy and X6 had no interest in it. He did all the projects and the Try This! sections and he will still work on his Junior notebook journal. Lesson 9 was better but there is still a lot of reading and its hard for him to stick around for the whole thing...

I was going to do two days a week of science but it really is better to keep the flow going since there is so much reading involved. We are now at 5 days a week of science and believe it or not A8 really enjoys it!

Because we live in the Northeast and winter is coming we skipped to lesson 9... insects. Lessons 9 through 14 are all bug related which makes more sense to do now than later. Lessons 2 -8 are bird related which we can do at any time of the year because we always have birds in our backyard... in the colder months we have some beautiful birds who visit our feeders!!

Here's a few pics of the projects we've been doing from the book!

Gliders... which one can go the farthest?

Chrysalis... which one will come out first??!!

We have also drowned a grasshopper and watched it come back to life with a little salt and put a bug in the fridge just to see it slow down... I wanted to put it in the freezer... but it doesn't say to do that.. ha ha!!

Can't wait for what's next!

We are really enjoying science and I am learning a lot! Hopefully the kids are too!! :)