Happy Hearts

We have been having so much fun with this topic so far.  These are the things we did this week.

Monday we looked at pictures of bird skeletons, and discussed why their bones are hollow, and why their breasts have so much muscle.  We learned the basic body and feather parts.  We drew pictures of birds.

Tuesday we read about the anhinga bird, and we set up a bird feeder.  The birds didn’t start visiting until Friday!  We had a squirrel and a chipmunk come on the first day though.  We also talked about preening.  Sang the Kookaburra song.

Wednesday Alan looked at different shaped beaks with them, and discussed how God made each beak perfect for gathering and eating the food that bird eats.  They also made eagle masks.

Thursday we researched the vulture and read some books about birds and watched a video about owls.

Friday we talked about James Audobon, and looked at some of his paintings.  The kids then painted their own pictures of birds.  T1 did a hawk and H did a turkey.  T2 just made a mess.:)  I made a penguin. 

We went to the fair and got to see roosters, turkeys, pheasant, peacocks, chickens, and even 2 baby chicks that were hatching. 

We are done with Insects.  We did a few more activities, and then we did just a review the rest of the week.  We are starting Attentiveness/Birds on Monday. 

 The kids are excited that they are going to make a bird feeder with daddy.

Well, we ended up going out of town to visit family for quite awhile, so we haven’t started week 5 yet.  We’ll be starting next Monday. 

Our butterflies emerged while we were gone.  We forgot them when we first left, and had to come back home for them! 

The kids thought it was really cool, and so did I.  They enjoyed watching them fly, eat (with their probiscis-they loved that), and even mate-which I hope means maybe we will get to do this whole thing over again.  T1 had some pretty good questions about the whole mating process.  I don’t even want to know what is going to come out of his mouth next week at VBS! 

While we were gone, they did look for insects everywhere we went.  We finally found a praying mantis, 2 of them!!  We’ve been looking for those for weeks, and I can’t believe we actually found some.  They were just nymphs, but we put them in a glass jar with some ants.  They got to see one catch an ant and start to chew on it.  A little while later we went back to watch them some more, and the ants had killed one, and had overpowered the other.  We talked about how they had to work together as a team to get what they wanted.

They also found some Japanese beetles, June bugs, a really cool neon green moth, lightning bugs, and what I think were some wood-boring beetles. 

They did find 1 frog and 2 toads that they played with for several hours at Aunt J’s house.  They were thrilled with them, you would have thought it was Christmas morning. 

We also celebrated July 4th, and they learned a little bit of our country’s independance.  It was cute, while we were watching a fireworks show, T1 said about an oval shaped one-”look that one looks just like a crysalis”.  Of course H started saying the same thing.    T1 also thought one looked “just like a straw hat”.  No clue where that came from.

All in all, we had a great little vacation.