Truman's Aunt Farm & Ant Unit Study

Most of our focus was on the study of ants since we did this to go along with the Zoology 1 section on ants.
We did spend time talking about homonyms, homographs, aunts, and repetition though.

Books we read

We made an anthill cake. The anthill is crushed graham crackers with chocolate sprinkles. There are also chocolate sprinkles inside the cake.

 

 

Egg Carton Ants

Molly and her gold ant

Caleigh with the giggles

Colin and his moustached ant

 

Notebook pages (printables from Homeschool Share and Aussie Pumpkin Patch)

 

We do have an ant farm I planned to use. When I mailed away for the ants, it came back undeliverable though. I gathered some ants from our yard, but they quickly escaped. I think they were small enough to get through the air holes. I know the kids would love to see ants tunneling so I'm going to try to find some bigger ants.

Katy and the Big Snow

I've been collecting books for this study for a while and watching the weather forecast in the hopes we could do it when it snowed. Unfortunately, the only snow we've had was during Christmas break. We've had spring-like weather the last couple weeks so I gave up on snow and decided to go ahead.

Here are some of the many snow books we read during the week.

In addtion to reading Snowflake Bentley, we watched this video about Wilson Bentley.
To go along with reading Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening, we watched this where you can hear Robert Frost recite the poem. For fun, we also watched this version from The Muppet Show.
The Story of Snow: The Science of Winter's Wonder by Mark Cassino was good in helping the kids understand about the different types of snow crystals, how they're formed, their size, and why each of them is different.
The kids really liked Snow Globe Family, which was a book we hadn't read before.


When you read about snow, you have to make coffee filter snowflakes. Molly said she thought this would be boring, but then it was fun. It didn't really hold Colin's interest though. He made one and left. The girls made a huge stack.

We also made crystal snowflakes. Here are the girls with their snowflakes made from pipe cleaners and string.

We put boiling water and borax in a jar and then added food coloring.

After mixing it all together, put the snowflake in the jar. The snowflake is hanging from a popsicle stick.

After a few hours, they looked like this.

We also made snow themed food.

Meatloaf and mashed potatoes snowman

Snowball cookies

Tortilla snowflakes

I made each of the kids 3 circle pancakes. Then they had mini M&Ms, marshmallows, chocolate chips, and sprinkles to decorate them.

We learned about responsibility, running a city, stop signs, snow, blizzards, and what makes snowflakes unique. The kids made their own snow similes to review from when they learned what similes were during our study of Owl Moon. I reviewed compound words with Caleigh. We also reviewed compass roses and directions.

Owl Moon

Our Five in a Row book last week was Owl Moon by Jane Yolen. 

Some of the owl books we read

I think Owl Babies was the favorite book of the week for all the kids. We also read many books about the moon (I showed a picture of them in my weekly wrap-up), Crinkleroot's Book of Animal Tracking, and a section of Winnie the Pooh about tracks.


Owl Lunch:

Peanut butter sandwich with sides cut; banana slices and chocolate chips (or raisins) for eyes; almond for beak. Molly insisted she needed pretzels on the bottom for branches.

I ordered owl pellets for the kids to go through.

Bones from the pellet

Attempting to put the bones together to see what it was.

They also spent some time working with a virtual owl pellet.

Paper Plate Owls

Molly said hers is a snowy owl because she didn't want to color it

We made two kinds of owl cookies. When I shaped one of these to show the kids, Colin asked if it was a cat and Caleigh thought it was a bear. So I'm not sure they really look like owls, but the kids had fun decorating them anyway.

For these, I added cocoa powder to some of the cookie dough. I rolled the white dough into a log. Then I rolled out the chocolate. I put the log on top of that and rolled it all together. Then I sliced them and laid 2 of them side by side touching, added an almond nose, and baked. Once they were finished, we added chocolate chip eyes.

We also learned about the moon. Most of our time was spent talking about the phases of the moon. We used Oreo cookies to demonstrate them.

Telling time file folder game with owls.

These are the owls we got to see at a library program we attended on raptors.

Notebook pages:

Colin and Caleigh used all the same lapbook pieces so their pages are pretty much the same.

The other side of the extension I added is still blank. I'll print a picture or two from the week to put there.

These are Molly's pages. She didn't do the language arts stuff except for similes. She liked making sentences for that. One of hers was "The moon is large like Colin's head." Ahh... sibling love.

She did this extra book about owls, where she pasted pictures in for the answers.

For our notebooks, we used lapbook pieces from:
Homeschool Share Owl Moon
Homeschool Share Owl Babies
Homeschool Share Nocturnal Animals
Lapbook Lessons- Owls

They each drew two owls to include on their pages, one from directions in Draw Write Now and the other from Literature Pockets.

Mirette on the High Wire

This week's Five in a Row book was Mirette on a High Wire. In history we were learning about France during the early Middle Ages so I wanted a FIAR book that was also about France.

Some books we read this week: Starring Mirette and Bellini, Mirette and Bellini Cross Niagara Falls, The Man Who Walked Between the Towers, Madeline, A Spree in Paree, The Inside-Outside Book of Paris, and Harold's Circus. We also watched this video of the book, The Man Who Walked Between the Towers found here.

Colin and Caleigh built Eiffel Towers from Legos.

We found out about many things that were invented in France from the book, Look What Came From France, including parachutes

and French toast.

The kids made circus posters advertising their tightrope act that you can see below on their notebook pages. Here they are performing:

Then they tried it with binoculars so it looked like everything was far away.

After that, they started performing more daring feats. 



Caleigh making an omelet like Bellini did in the book



Molly making omelet

  

Molly on Colin's shoulders like Mirette



Except for one thing each, the kids did the same activities for their notebooks. They all found France on a map, colored the French flag, colored circus books (from Enchanted Learning) with words in French, figured out what color the French words stood for to color the picture the correct color, and made their circus poster. The othr mini books came from Homeschool Share.

Molly's-- she also identified the starting sounds of circus words

Caleigh's-- she did a compound word activity

Colin-- he found the places from Bellini's career that were mentioned in the book including Naples, Niagara Falls, the Alps, Moscow, Barcelona, and Paris.