Thursday, September 30, 2010

Armadillo Rodeo

Last week we used the HomeschoolShare unit for Armadillo Rodeo. Jack has read enough Jan Brett to recognize her books as soon as he sees them, so he was excited.

Jack used the instructions from Jan Brett's site to draw his own armadillo.

We did another sink/float experiment (because armadillos cannot swim and will sort of inflate themselves to get across deeper water) and were surprised with some of our results.

Some of the vocabulary from the story along with a custom boot design!

We read a few go-along books, too. When we read Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch, I was impressed that Jack picked up on the parallel construction.

I picked this book up at Half-Price Books last year and we love it! It has tons of information and experiments and activities. Jack likes to look through it on his own, too!

One of the experiments was to see of you could get water from the soil like animals in dry climates do. We were partially successful. I think that if I had gotten the saran wrap down tighter it would have worked better, but it was a windy day and the hole was big enough that we needed to use two pieces, so it was hard to get it tight.

In math, we discussed standard and non-standard measurements. I picked up this book at Mardel to use as a review, since this was not a completely new concept. We talked about how horses are measured in hands (a hand is actually four inches) and measured different things in hands and figured out how many inches that would be.

Boot cookies!

We took a trip to a local museum which has a wonderful kids' room! They got to sit on a saddle and try to use a lasso and there was even a fake campfire and reading area, complete with a copy of Armadillo Rodeo! Unfortunately, photography is not allowed in the museum, or I would have a picture here of Alice sticking her head in the fire.

We capped off the week with our rodeo visit!

This has been a light school week since we have had a lot to do outside of the house, but next week we are starting back up with How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World--complete with a visit to an apple orchard!

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