Weird Stuff!

Miss L's most favorite unit study ever.  This unit focused on her love of "weird stuff" as she calls it, the unusual and unexplained things in our world.  We used a variety of books and materials.  Since she's so in love with the topic, some of the things on this list were not specifically used for this unit study, but have been hits here and easily could have been included had we not already done them. Her interests skew toward medical mysteries, mythical animals, and similar oddities so we went more that direction than UFOs.

Read aloud:
Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder
This is not a book marketed to children.  I started reading it to her on a lark and had my doubts that she would comprehend it and/or that it would hold her interest, but she surprised me and really did enjoy it.

Spine:
Strange Mysteries from Around the World, Seymour Simon.
This book is written at her reading level (approximately 4th grade) so we could easily read it together and use it as a base from which to jump off into more detail.  This book was originally written in the early 1980s, so it was interesting to compare some of the information in this book with newer information from other sources.

Supplementary books:

• Unexplained!  Strange Sightings, Incredible Occurrences, and Puzzling Physical Phenomena, Jerome Clark.  A big, dense book of more obscure unexplained phenomena.  We read selected portions aloud. Miss L particularly liked the monster sightings. 
• Weird Washington and Weird U.S.: A Freaky Field Trip Through the 50 States Both of these include short vignettes of the unusual and unexplained.  Nice geography tie-in.  Weird U.S. is intended for kids, but Weird Washington is also fine for the interested kid.
• Unexplained, Judy Allen  Kids title.  In the style of Eyewitness books.
• The Griffin and the Dinosaur
• Ripley's Search for the Shrunken Head and Other Curiosities Interesting pop-ups and interactive materials in this one.
• Other Ripley Believe It or Not books
• Enigmas, Vowery Carlisle.  A writing curriculum using historical mysteries

Documentaries (all available on Netflix):

• The Legend of the Crystal Skulls
• Selected episodes of Myth Hunters and/or Weird or What?  (preview to see which you prefer)
• Selected episodes of Oddities (currently unavialable)

Projects/Hands On/Field Trips

• Made a mythical creature fossil out of bones from an owl pellet
• Made a fairy mummy and/or Fiji mermaid out of small novelty halloween skeletons and craft supplies
• Found an unknown baby animal on the lawn, tried to identify it.  Took it to a local museum to get it positively identified and preserved.
• Visited the website of the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus.  True?  Fake?  How can you tell?Can you fool others with your own creation?
• Curated her own exhibit of "weird stuff" in a curio cabinet and made a companion guidebook
• Visit museums like Ye Olde Curiosity Shop, Ripley's exhibit at the science center, other small local oddity shop/museums.

Notes on Dinosaurs

So, many kids are dino-crazy and want to study them, but a lot of homeschooling parents don't know where to start.  Or after you've whetted a child's appetite by watching Walking with Dinosaurs or some simple dinosaur reader books, where do you go from there?  Last night I met with a few other homeschooling moms to share ideas, run down the basics on dinosaurs to get your feet wet, and give some ideas on books and resources and activities that may help extend and enrich a dinosaur study.  Most of our ideas focused on the elementary years but many are applicable to much older students as well.   I previously posted about some of these resources, but I've expanded the list and added an assortment of themes or "pegs" to help organize your thoughts and activities about dinosaurs.  You can find the outline of what we discussed and a list of resources as a pdf document free to browse or download at the link below.

Notes on Dinosaurs

Drop me a line if you have any questions or would like to discuss ideas.  Enjoy!

Whooooo loves tiny bones?

This week we finally took advantage of K's interest in owls (he just finished #10 in the Gaurdians of Ga'hoole series) and L's interest in birds and skeletons.  Owl pellets!

Ours were from American Science and Surplus.  It said two pellets would be in the package, but there was just one.  Oh well, it was a large one, so I broke it in half and each child got to work on half.

It did not take long to start finding bones.

One fairly large skull started to emerge quickly, too.

All in all, we ended up with the remains of three separate skulls and lots of fascinating little bones. 

K had fun using the included pamphlet to identify different bones and the species...we think we had at least two vole skulls, with the third skull too broken to really make an attempt.

In the end Mr. K even wanted to arrange all the bones in a museum-style display.

A few bucks well spent, for sure.  I appear to have whetted their appetite for dissection, however.  Ms. L found page 20 of the Home Science Tools catalog and has asked to dissect a starfish!  Someday, kiddo.  Baby steps.

Another honey-do project, done!

The boys here are into archery.  They have been planning for a while to make a real target of our own for the back yard.  Does that sound like an chance for "learning opportunities" or what?

The plan:

The kids honestly did not help much with that.  But they did "help" with The Shopping Trip:

If you count weighing down the cart and checking bolt sizes counts as helping.  Luckily, I do!

The help they provided during the power tools portion of the assembly, was more of the moral support variety.  But they were outside during that phase of work, and found some fuzzy caterpillars on the grass not far from the assembly station, so I'll take it.

Fully on-board with project testing, however!

The closer you stand, the easier it is to hit the target.  True story.

Fibonacci Spirals in the Woods

A few weeks ago I ran across the wonderful videos by Vi Hart combining mathematics with doodles and plants and flowers.  These start by beautifully demonstrating how many plants and flowers grow in spiral forms that follow the Fibonacci series of numbers (you remember, in which each number in the series is the sum of the two previous-- 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, etc.)  Part 1 is below. 

This captured my imagination. So during one of the sunbreaks, the kids and I watched this again, then headed out to the trails in the woods out the back, to see if we could find any spirals.  Being mid-winter, it's not the best time to go looking, but we did find cones from a Douglas Fir and some kind of lonely pine tree (we forgot the identification books in our haste to get outside). 

Then, we brought the cones inside and got to counting. 

Like Vi Hart, we used different colors to help keep track of the rows of spirals.  Glitter glue was involved. 

And it worked!  For both types of cones, Fibonacci numbers represent!

If/when we try this again in the spring or summer, I'm going to make sure we have *fresh* tubes of glitter glue on hand, and find larger cones or flowers to count.  These little guys were still tight and tiny.  Definitely a fun diversion, though!

Miss L just saw the video screen again over my shoulder as I type this and asked to watch it again.  So, until next time...

Sensory Experiences

Someday, I'll need to do a post about our curriculum choices, but one of the cornerstones of what we use now is Moving Beyond the Page (MBTP). After trying different levels and permutations of how to make it work for our family, what seems to be working now is using the level appropriate for my younger child (right now, the 5-7) with both kids, but and enriching and supplementing as we go to make it more difficult for the older as well.  He's the trickier one anyway, I haven't found any curriculum that will work for him without modification, so I might as well stick with what *I* like for now and just find the way to use it with him. 

Anyway, we're just wrapping up a MBTP unit on the senses (Level 5-7, Concept 2, Unit 2).  This has been great fun, with lots of little projects and experiments using sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste.    Often, several at once. 

Or taking some away.

The kids were blindfolded so often in these lessons, to try tasting things they couldn't see, or walk down the hallway using only touch, or to identify their location in the house using only sound, that I think those bandannas have new permanent creases.

One of Big K's favorite experiments was one in which I (unbeknownst to him) poured a small amount of clear soda into several glasses, then added a drop of food color to each glass, making the soda in each glass a different color.  The kids then tasted each one, we wrote down their impressions of the flavor in each glass, then blindfolded them and had them taste each glass again.  Of course, the answers were very different this time.  The objective--teaching the kids that sometimes your senses can trick other senses, came through loud and clear and was definitely a "lightbulb moment".

Another thing I liked about this unit was the frequent suggestions to go outside and practice using your senses outdoors.  Being mid-winter, we're often reluctant to go outside in the cold and the damp, but the recent snowfall made for some very interesting sensory observations!  For Miss L, yes, all of the 5 senses were represented.

Then, the snow melted.  Mud, everywhere.  We're having a bit of a run of sun this week, a very different but welcome sensory experience! 

The next unit, which we will start in a day or two, is "We're the Same, We're Different" and explores what makes people similar and different, both nearby and different cultures.  Looking forward to it!

Borax snowflake success!

This week-before-Christmas is very light as far as 'schoolwork'.  Instead we are doing a week of crafts and low-stress activities.  One thing I wanted us to try was making Borax snowflakes.  We've never had much luck with sugar crystals, but these worked like a charm!

Plus, they looked so pretty in the jars with a drop of food coloring:

And they turned out so sparkly!

The instructions said to leave them for at least 8 hours, but for us they grew so quickly that after only 6 hours they were starting to grow extra 'arms'.  Oh, well, still fun!

Kids on Wheels

Every Thursday, the boy spends the day with a combination of Dad, Grandma, and Grandpa.  The last few weeks he and Grandpa have been hard at work on a semi-secret project.  Today, they finished it!

Time well spent, I think!