Cats, Bats, Snakes, and Earthquakes!

Here's what we have studied, researched, or done since returning from our vacation:

Cat Breeds We have a dog breeds book and poster and Olivia wanted to know about cat breeds. We watched a slide show and read about the different breeds and their origins at http://www.cfa.org/breeds.html

Calendar Olivia has been wanting to know how much longer until her birthday. Nearly everyday she takes the calendar down to look through it to check. This has helped her to learn about months, days, and weeks. It is also a weather calender from Farmers' Almanac. The picture for June is a tornado. So she has also learned about tornadoes!

Painting The girls both wanted to add to my Mother's Day paintings, so they had fun with that.

Dark Ages From playing Age of Empires II: Age of Kings, the girls have learned about several civilizations. We have read about Genghis Khan and the Mongols, the Huns, Goths, Franks, Vikings, Celts, Joan of Arc, etc. We have also read and watched a show on the History Channel about ancient weapons, ships, and technologies.

Virginia Wildlife Georgia read in the book she bought while in Virginia.

Cooking and Baking The girls have each had their own jobs to do for preparing supper. Olivia cooks the vegetable in the microwave, and Georgia has made mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese, and chopped vegetables for a salad. Georgia has also made muffins and pudding, reading the recipe herself and measuring out the ingredients. This was a great lesson in fractions for her. She even added fractions together in her head pretty quickly.

Parasites We watched a show on human and animal parasites on the Animal Planet. (Eeew) And Georgia read some more about them in her Weird and Wild Creature Cards.

Bats We went to the Boonshoft Museum of Discovery on Wednesday and saw the new exhibit on bats. We learned about several different types of bats from all over the world. We learned about the different things they eat, different places they live, etc. We learned about how they hear and tried on some bat ears that amplified noise. We also experimented with echoes. And we got to see live bats hanging upside down, flying, and eating. They are so cute!!

Georgia hearing like a bat

Igneous Rocks Also at Boonshoft, Georgia was having a ball checking out the different rock samples they had.

Spelling We watched a national spelling bee on television and Georgia loved it. (a homeschooler ended up winning, too!) During commercials Georgia had me look up words in the dictionary to ask her. She wants to have our own little spelling bee each week.

Jamestown & Powhatan Village When we visited Historic Jamestown we purchased a set of miniature Jamestown villagers and Powhatan villagers. The girls play with them and learn a lot about life in the early 1600s, as well as what tasks villagers had, transportation, weapons, clothing, diet, etc. We want to make a diorama of this one day this summer.

Beavers, Wasps, Hippos, Cobras, Cottonmouths, and Copperheads Some of the topics of the library books Georgia read this week.

Ohio Snakes Georgia read about snakes in Ohio on the Ohio Dept of Natural Resources Wildlife Division web site. http://www.dnr.ohio.gov/wildlife/Resources/reptiles/reptiles.htm She also read a booklet we have from them on Ohio Snakes, and another on Ohio Fish.

Soccer We have had fun kicking around the soccer ball, and Georgia enjoys trying new tricks with the ball.

Rummicube game We love this game. Olivia does not yet understand how to play but she helps one of us out.

Feathers Georgia devised an experiment on feathers. She has five different feathers and wants to know which one will "fly" the farthest when released in front of a fan. And another experiment will be to time them and see which one is airborne the longest amount of time. Today we wrote out our question, hypothesis, and procedure, but she wanted to wait for her father to perform the experiments.

Plate Tectonics Georgia was interested in learning how and why earthquakes occur. We looked up plate tectonics and had a quick overview of the process.

Minerals Georgia was interested in seeing a picture of gold and copper. We have a mineral book from the library so we looked it up. This spurred a conversation on atoms and molecules. We then talked about the molecular structure of water. We looked in one of her science books to view pictures and diagrams of atoms and molecules.