Fox Unit Study

It’s Fox Week here at Homeschooling in the Rose Garden!!

Today started out with a storybook study/nature study on the wild red fox.  I base it on this book by Shirley Woods:

This story is amazing!  In fact, I would highly recommend any of Shirley Woods naturalist series.  I have all of them and we will be spending most of our time going through these for our storybook and nature studies this year along with Trickle Creeks, Ecojournals.  If you enjoy nature study and Charlotte Mason these are the books to get!

We are pairing these two wonderful resources with a few Homeschool Share Lapbook materials.  I pick and choose what I use with this to what would help my children specifically.  Slowly, throughout the book, we can fill out different portions of the lapbook with answers.  For example, the first three chapters we covered several varieties of prey that foxes hunt, two different dens that foxes use and live in, and two different types of barks that foxes will use to warn young and mates.  This gave us information for a whole section of the Lapbook and we hadn’t even gotten half way through the book!

Fox Lapbook from Homeschool Share

Here are some videos we found very useful and fun for our Fox study:

Fox Sounds:

5 Wild Fox Kits Playing:

Aesop's Fables about teasing.  Aesop's Fable Lapbook (we only used the Fox and the Stork portion).

Aesop's Fables - The Fox and The Stork:

And the last one, just for fun, Foxes jumping on a back yard trampoline!

And that’s just for starters.

Field Trip - Kennedy Creek Chum Salmon Run

The trip there was incredibly beautiful!  From the second we got off the freeway we were in these beautiful wooded roads with their full fall colors showing.  It was amazingly lovely.  And luckily, I was the passenger so I was able to have him slow down and take some shots of the drive.

The path around the creek was lovely as well.

We got there just as another homeschool group was leaving. We were about to head down on our own when the trail guide (Katie) told us she’d take us to where the salmon were jumping right now.

Luke wanted to be down and on his own for everything.  He was so curious about the water that he accidently dropped one of his boots in the river!  I almost fell in getting it out!

It was crazy cute to watch him though. 

I am so glad we went!  It’s the second in a long line of field trips that we are going to be taking this school year.  I am excited about what the kids will be learning on our many trips.

Field Trip - Lattin’s Cider Mill Pumpkin Patch

Autumn copywork, pressing leaves, and preserving spiderwebs

We have been very focused on the changes going on in nature right now. The nights are getting colder and the days are getting shorter quickly. It is very clearly almost fall.

Logan got his first taste of copywork today.  We copied a Waldorf poem onto watercolor paper and he wanted to be included… so I had him write the last lines on his watercolor sheet.  I think he did a fantastic job!

Here was Cyan’s copy work.  Her painting and her handwriting were just lovely.  They both are on the nature table now.  I knew it wouldn’t stay empty for long!

Today for Kindergarten science we pressed leaves! As we went on our nature walk he found fallen leaves and brought them in to press.

He loved the ones that still had green on them because they were ‘pretty’.

Then, along with the siblings, we preserved spiderwebs!  First, we went on a spiderweb hunt around the yard.  The best ones were found on the rhododendron bushes in the back of the yard.  They were still complete, even though there was no spider in them. 

Most garden spiders build a new web every night, so I didn’t feel bad about taking the three that we had found as it won’t take the spider long to build a new one.  I was careful, however, not to spray paint a web with a spider in it. 

The two we found with spiders sitting in the center of their webs we left alone, but we spent some time observing the spiders that lived there, and noting their brown and yellow markings (making them a type of ‘garden spider’).

I preserved the web by holding up some cardboard behind the empty spiderweb and spray painting (very gently and from over a foot away) the web.  I took about 20 minutes to let that dry.  Then I sprayed a sheet of cardstock with Elmer’s spray glue and waited until it was good and ‘tacky’.  Then I slid the cardstock behind the painted web, and gently pulled it forward until the web was stuck to the sheet of paper and this is what I ended up with:

We did two, and although you can see the color on the black sheet better in photos, I like the detail you can see clearly on the white sheet… which doesn’t show up in pictures as well, but is quite amazing in person!  We added these to sleeves in the kids nature notebooks after some fun up close observation and now they will have a spiders web to study at will!

It was a neat project to do after yesterday’s school project of reading about spiders and trying to make our own webs!

 

What a fun and awesome school day!

Back in the saddle again. :)

We are stating light with a unit study on Little House in the Big Woods and a quick study of our maple tree out back that is having some trouble.  We only did 6 workboxes today so we could have our sunny day (one of our VERY few this summer) set aside for cabin building (we are making a playhouse!!).  I figured we would learn as much from putting the siding on our playhouse than we would from sitting inside doing worksheets. 

I am substituting my reading aloud for audio books right now to get in the groove of schooling again, and it’s working out beautifully. I will get back to having my school read-aloud time with them in a few weeks, but for now we are really enjoying Audiobooks.  Today, we listened to the first two chapters of “Little House in the Big Woods” narrated by Cherry Jones.  If you haven’t heard this version, I highly suggest it!  She does such a wonderful job!  She has a husky tenor voice that it easily believable as Ma, Pa, or any of the children.  She does the singing and the fiddle music playing behind the story is just lovely.

We were all enthralled. 

After the chapters for today were complete, we started the Little House in the Big Woods lapbook, starting with the cover pages, the smoke house, and the log cabin on the back. 

Next up was nature study.  I had marked the page in Fun with Nature Trees, Leaves, and Bark to the page that had the maple tree on it and I sent Logan out back to discover which tree was the Maple.  It only took him a few minutes to come back in with a maple leaf!  I went out with him and we looked at the pictures and compared the maple tree in the book to our maple in the yard.  We came back in with a few leaves and spent some time making leaf rubbings for our Nature Notebooks.

We did two on top of each other with different colors so you could see the different sizes of the leaves on the tree right now… then we marked the date and wrote down the words ‘Maple Tree’ on the page.

Next up was a Montessori activity called “Animal Farm”.  Since Logan is reading 3 and 4 letter words pretty well now I just let him do the whole thing by himself. 

The only one he needed help with was “Lamb” (of course) because he was trying to find ‘sheep’.

After this we worked on Logan’s sight words while Cyan worked on her spelling list.  He is having a little trouble with blends and digraphs so I pulled out the ones that are in the first two lists of the Dolch Words chart and we worked on those for a few minutes. 

Then I moved over to Cyan as Logan played with the counting manipulitives in the next workbox.

She is doing spelling words from a note she wrote back in may where she misspelled them.  I had her write them correctly twice and then practice them out loud, then we did the test.  She only missed two, but she wrote those out 5 times while saying them aloud at the same time.  We will use this same list for the whole school week.

Logan’s last box for today was number recognition.  This was something he was really having trouble with when we started our break.  He doesn’t seem to have any issue now.  Even so, I made it so that he was using stickers instead of having to remember the number, remember what it looked like, and then trying to recreate that with his 5 year old fingers at the same time.  lol!  Next time I will add in him writing them, because it seemed that this was super easy and went very quickly.  But he enjoyed the success!

Kindergarten and 6th grade have begun!