Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Worms, Wolves, and Work


Compare this to the photo in my previous post!

Hooray! We have our school room back! And--get this--it has a CEILING! It's still pretty disorganized and dusty, but we don't care. It was fun doing "sofa school" and "car school" and even "IHOP school," but as Dude says, "It's good to be back in our real school."

We started the week with our new science unit: we're using Mary Appelhoff's Worms Eat Our Garbage. Our red wigglers arrived last week and they are happily munching bread crusts and banana peels in their lovely new home.


Red wiggler and egg case by Dude

We put a couple of wigglers in a petri dish with a little water and held them over a lamp so we could see through them. I didn't get any pictures because the kids were so concerned for the worms' safety and comfort that they quickly dumped them back in the bin. We were lucky enough to find an egg case so we looked at it under the microscope.


Two great resources for worm study

Our Laura Ingalls Wilder study morphed into an American wildlife study, which turned into a wolf unit. You know how these things happen! So far we have read The Wolves Are Back by Jean Craighead George, Once a Wolf by Stephen Swinburne, and Best Book of Wolves and Wild Dogs by Christiane Gunzi.



Wolf myths

The kids are working together on a wolf notebook. They are particularly fascinated by wolves since we had the good fortune to see a wild one in Yellowstone last summer. We were at the right place at the right time, and it was an amazing experience!


Wolf facial expressions by Super. Alert; playful; afraid; angry.

The kitchen flood happened just as we were starting a new unit on decimals. I couldn't get to any of my MOTL materials while the basement was being repaired, so we had to improvise. We watched some Maths Mansions videos on YouTube and played games. I'm not even going to attempt to reconstruct what we covered for my MOTL records; it's easier to just start where we are now!


Homemade number sentence game

I really wouldn't know, but I'm pretty sure that when people decide to remodel their home, they usually make some sort of PLAN before they demolish the kitchen.


We're eating out A LOT

Since we didn't have that option, we are scrambling to get ours put back together. I'll never complain about making dinner again, I promise!

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