Hike it Homeschoolers: May 2018 Edition

I haven’t always loved hiking. But those days are far behind me.

Nowadays I run a 370+ member hiking group called Hike it Homeschoolers. (This is a blatant knock off name of Hike it Baby – please don’t sue me! 🙂 ) We aren’t for profit or advertise or get sponsorships or anything so I’m hoping it doesn’t matter. We are just a bunch of homeschoolers who like to go hiking together and make new friends – and we are pretty much isolated to 1 1/2 small counties in the entire United States. But if you happen to notice a name change and some major edits on all of these posts someday, you’ll know somebody didn’t like my choice of title.

The first year I started seriously hiking with my kids I tried to get a bunch of neighbors to go with us. Even though I’ve never seen a bear or mountain lion, I have this awful phobia that I’m going to be stuck in the wilderness with my defenseless little children and no other help and then all the sudden we’ll be attacked and that will be the end of it all. But maybe if there were a bigger group of us the scary bears and lions would just stay away, right?

That didn’t work out at all.

We ended up hiking every week, but mostly just by ourselves. Thankfully we were never eaten by bear nor mountain lion. All those hike reviews are listed as “A Hike A Week” or AHAW on the blog. You can search them with the search menu in the side bar area on the left. (Click on the little three bars at the top, then scroll down. There are so many goodies hidden behind those magic three bars!)

The second year, I figured out that the most social and family activity friendly people I know are actually homeschoolers! So I started this particular group so someone could protect me from all the nasty wildlife out there. Not all wildlife, of course, just the scary ones with big teeth and claws. The group grew really fast, but we average about 3 or 4 families a hike. That is just fine by me. That is generally about 15 to 20 people. I met some amazing people, made some fun friends, got the soul food out in nature that I needed (and my kids needed), and again, nobody got eaten.

Success!

Now on our third year, the numbers of the group continue to rise – but if May is any indication of how the rest of the year will go, we will probably still average about 3 to 4 families a hike. And like I said, that is perfect! (Although if we had 10 or more families I would probably also say that was perfect, too.) The point of the group – besides keeping me alive out in the woods – is to help families get into nature and give them a good list of local trails and hikes with reviews and photos.

This is why I love Hike it Baby! I never would have known about so many trails if it weren’t for that particular group. Although most of them are farther away from me, I appreciate and love seeing what is out there. If you aren’t a homeschooler local to my area, still get on Facebook and look for a Hike it Baby group near you. If your chapter is anything like mine, they are super inclusive, super active, and just a really great group of people and organization.

Hopefully now I’ve buttered them up enough that they wont decide to sue.

Actually, everything I said I totally believe. They are a great organization.

Anyway – here are our hikes for the month of May.

Battle Creek Falls 

This one is actually not my favorite. It is pretty short, but uphill and exposed to a lot of sun. The trail is rocky gravel for most of the way, and the descent to the waterfall is pretty steep, although very short and very doable. I purposely scheduled this hike for when all the public schools were still in session because it also gets really crowded. The kids had an absolute blast. It was a perfect day. We almost had the entire trail to ourselves! https://www.alltrails.com/trail/us/utah/battle-creek-falls

Dominguez Hill (a.k.a. The Escalante Cross) 

This is also not one of my favorite hikes, but it really is a good one. When Father Dominguez and Father Escalante (of Spain/Mexico) were exploring the West, they came out of what is now called Spanish Fork canyon and crested this hill to take in the scenery. Should they go north or south? (They went south. But this is where the town of Spanish Fork got it’s name – even though it was mostly settled by Icelanders – go figure.) I think they did build a few forts or settlements throughout their wanderings, but none of them ever became permanent – to my knowledge at least – and of course eventually all this land became US territory anyway.

The trailhead starts at the reservoir and campground. It goes into the woods and up into Snell Canyon for a ways before turning around and heading up the other side. Then it follows the ridge line until you descend low enough to plop right down on a big cross made out of white steel beams. You get a gorgeous view of Spanish Fork, the entire south end of the valley, and you are pretty much right on top of all the windmills – so that is fun, too.  Side note – if you ever fly from Denver to Salt Lake City, you will fly directly over this entire area about 15 minutes before landing. The mountains, canyon, and windmills are easy to see from the air, but the cross is a little more difficult to point out from up in the air. Don’t stare too hard. It’s absolutely beautiful and you will be tempted to move here.

I don’t care for this hike so much because of the very steep and loose rock ridge lines. There is no danger of falling off a cliff or anything, but this is not fun to do with toddlers or babies in hiking backpacks. Generally, I have always had at least one of those with me when I’ve hiked this trail. This year, the youngest child I brought was 5, so it was significantly more enjoyable. https://www.alltrails.com/trail/us/utah/dominguez-hill

Waiting for the group to arrive. These are my kids playing at the reservoir with the cross in the background. Eventually we will get there – but not via that super steep trail you can see in the pic. 

This is coming out of Snell Canyon looking back up into the Canyon. You can hike up there, too. (We did it last year) But it is pretty steep, especially at the end. And eventually the trail becomes less (or un) maintained and a little more difficult to follow.

A better view of Snell Canyon and part of the trail on the ridge line

You can tell this kid just *loves* going on all these hikes with his mom! He’s so lucky! 😉

The Grotto

This is another super popular and super easy hike. I would have done this before public school let out except the canyons are still gated until about Memorial Day due to snow, so we had to wait and just endure the crowds. (Technically, we were the crowd.) The “parking lot” was only about half full when we started out, but when we came back down it was packed to overflowing. We got out just at the right time! The trail is slightly uphill, almost completely shaded in the trees, and crosses a little stream on little bridges before ending up in a little open cave with a waterfall pouring in – a grotto, if you will. I’ve seen people bring small lawn chairs up there to just lounge around, enjoy the afternoon, and let their kids play around in the water and rocks. This hike is fun, beautiful, and easy enough that my 3 year old could easily do the entire thing AND he had a blast in the water.

Just beware the crowds. (Which I guess this time means watch out for the likes of me!)  https://www.alltrails.com/trail/us/utah/grotto-falls-trail

My 3rd grader found a moth that had just newly come out of its chrysalis! It’s a good thing we raised butterflies this spring, otherwise we wouldn’t have known the signs to look for! (See, school doesn’t really end just because you are in summer break.)

Have you taken your family on any of these hikes? I would also love to hear about other hikes – whether in my area or not – that you have gone one. In my opinion, the more people get out of the city and into the trees, the better!

2017-2018 Homeschool Year in Review

There were some really good things and then again, there are some things to work on. But isn’t that how it usually is? Well, sometimes there are some pretty crappy things, but overall school was pretty good. No, it was better than just “pretty good.” It was something to be proud of.

(Or “of which to be proud,” if the end of sentence preposition bugs you – it bugs me sometimes.)

Having three kids in homeschool for the first time can maybe be likened to having your third child. Technically, unless your husband was home, you were outnumbered with the second, but the third just makes it painfully obvious in case you were in denial before. Multiplying your children also multiplies your work load, whether you homeschool or not.

But definitely when you homeschool.

So I told myself over and over again that it was ok to be stressed out sometimes. It was ok to be frustrated and feel overworked. It was ok to somedays be so aggravated that I wanted to put that third child in public school and not have to deal with all of his push back and defiance anymore.

(There! See? Now I’ve had that experience, too! It didn’t last terribly long because I can’t imagine ever sending my children to public school, but still. Now I understand what I’ve only heard other people say before. More than once, I did in fact tell myself all of these troubles would be gone if I just sent that kid away to school. Of course, then we would just have a new set of troubles to deal with…)

Let’s start with what went right and some of the details.

My older two, the 5th and 3rd graders, learned how to work independently on most of their school work! I give myself major points for this victory, although I’m sure I had absolutely nothing to do with it. My 5th grader just hit that developmental milestone and suddenly internalized responsibility (somewhat, at least) and like magic, now he can teach himself math, grammar, handwriting, and how to write essays! And simultaneously my 3rd grader did all that, too. She’s a girl, so I hear that may have something to do with it. Whatever and however, one truth remains.

It. Was. Awesome.

Fifth Grade Review

The 5th grader completed Saxon Math 7/6, Writing and Rhetoric books 3 and 4 (Narrative II and Chreia and Proverb), The Good and The Beautiful Language Arts Level 4, Zaner-Bloser Handwriting Level 5, Latin for Children Primer C, and RSO Biology Level 2.  You can read about our entrepreneurship fun at the link included there. He also took private piano lessons for music. For history, he followed along with the little kids in their Story of the World Volume 1: Ancient Times. 

Math was awesome. Wouldn’t change a thing. Writing and Rhetoric, also awesome. The Good and The Beautiful for grammar? I know it’s the new cool thing to do. And it is both good and beautiful. But it wasn’t what I was looking for. There was too much overlap and redundancy (not the good kind) with the Writing and Rhetoric program and there was less grammar than what I had hoped. It is an beautiful Language Arts program – but I didn’t really want a Language Arts program, I wanted a grammar program. So we won’t be using it again – at least not with this particular child. The handwriting book was kind of meh. But not meh enough in a bad way to ditch it. His cursive is pretty nice, but his manuscript writing is still, well, not as nice. I’m just going to stick with that one.

Latin was hard! I read on CAP’s website that students who finish LFC Primer’s A-C can jump right in to Latin Alive 2, but my son and I both feel better doing Latin Alive 1 next year to help solidify some of this stuff.

That third declension! Why? Just why?

And I think the adverbs would have been a little easier if they didn’t all look and sound so similar, or if they didn’t translate to words like “whence,” “thence,” “whither, and “thither.” It’s like translating a dead language into another dead language and then into English.

Biology was really awesome. But it would have been more awesome if I only had one child and could focus all my time on that. It was too much for me. We now have a really cool microscope all nicely stored back in it’s box, because doing all those labs just got to be too much. More than half the time we couldn’t even get them to turn out right. I never, ever did see any bacteria in our yoghurt, nor half the other things we were supposed to see. But we certainly tried and we certainly learned a great deal. We didn’t have time to do any of the famous science research assignments. But I guess maybe that is what makes this program so good? There are so many options of things to do and ways to learn all of them, you get to pick and choose which ones you want to/have time to do? (Am I stretching too much?) That is how I had to look at it in the end anyway. We just had to pick an choose – and we chose to read the lessons, do the “Show What You Know” quizzes at the end of each chapter, review everything, and then take the end of unit tests.

History was great. But this is me you are talking to. I love pretty much anything history. It’s hard to mess that one up.

Well, ok, I guess you could mess history up pretty bad and quite easily, but if you have a history teacher/mama who truly loves this stuff, that helps quite a bit. We had a lot of fun.

Third Grade Review

My 3rd grader completed Saxon Math 5/4, First Language Lessons Level 3, Zaner-Bloser Handwriting level 3 (technically she is half way through but that is a long story), Latin for Children Primer A, RSO Life Sciences Level 1, and Story of the World Volume 1: Ancient Times. Entrepreneurship – see link above. And she finished her second full year singing with Millennial Choirs and Orchestras – I kind of wish all kids had an opportunity like that.

Math? Awesome. This girl knows her stuff and just does it all on her own. I certainly helped her through some sticky stuff, and she stays on focus quite a bit better if I am able to sit with her and guide her through, but she completed just about every single test with a 18, 19, or 20/20. You can’t get a whole lot better than that. Grammar was fine, just how I like it. She started diagramming sentences and learning more about different parts of speech. This was perfect timing for taking Latin for Children Primer A. She would be introduced and work on direct objects (something I really think few people know anything about) in her grammar book, and then two weeks later the concept would be introduced in her Latin lessons. This was the kind of overlap and repetition that supports itself instead of making itself annoying and redundant. Latin was still hard – because it is a foreign language and there is a lot of vocabulary and various linguistic aspects to think about all at the same time. But she did it! And I didn’t freak out on the last chapter when she didn’t remember every single word from the book! This mama is making progress! (Although she did do quite a bit better than her older brother when he was at this stage of his Latin education. Don’t tell him that.)

The handwriting? Meh. Same story as above.

Biology and History? So fun! I think both of those books are just the perfect level for this age. We slacked off a little bit at the end of the year in this biology book, too, though. I just didn’t want to go out and buy celery and put it in that blue food coloring water when we’ve already done that so many times before. (Ok, probably just once. But still!) So our biology at the end of the year kind of just looked like working in the garden, dissecting our tulips and daffodils, going on a hike, pulling weeds (as in pull them up by the roots! This wasn’t child labor, this was learning about roots, right?) and then planting all our seedlings we started in my laundry room.

Oh, what a glorious day it will be when all those hundreds of plants are outside where they belong! No more pink grow lights! No more “watering” my laundry baskets (thank you, three year old.) And no more potting soil spilled on the clean clothes!

A glorious day, indeed. I think I’m still about 3 weeks away, though.

In short, my third grader did wonderfully and I think she had a lot of fun, too.

First Grade Review

This is the difficult part.

This kid is so smart. He can work math magic in his mind. He’s got an engineering brain like no other first grader I’ve seen.

But boy, does he hate to do ANYTHING. I heard that phrase a whole lot this school year.

“I DON’T WANT TO DO ANYTHING!”

It was usually accompanied by full-on rolling-on-the-ground tantrums. He has perfected what in Utah is called a “crusty” (so weird! I am not native to this state, all I’m gonna say there) but would be known to all other peoples on earth as the “death stare.” Some days/weeks were so bad that whenever I asked him to do literally anything his eyes would darken, his face would twist itself up into contortions that made my own face hurt, his body would stiffen, and you could tell he was digging deep, pulling up all those angry, defiant, and explosive emotions to throw at me the moment I uttered one more syllable. Which of course, I always did. Because the more you repeat the request, the more likely they are to comply, right? No. Not right.

Seriously, child! What am I to do with you? All you’ve got to do is write the date at the top of this math paper! Where is the abuse here? Where is all this anger coming from?

Now, I have a lot of patience. I am in this for the long haul. I may momentarily think of sending a child away to school, but I know that will not be my reality and I am willing to do what it takes to help each child learn, be happy, develop appropriately, and feel loved, safe, and comfortable, while helping them reach their potential, whatever that may be as I know it will look different for each child.

But you know what? This mama knows how to get angry herself. I have perfected my own anger projecting strategies and when I use them, just let me say EVERYONE knows how mama is feeling and they know I expect some immediate action.

Except this kid. Well, he knows. He just doesn’t care, I think. He was helping me pull weeds the other day – bless his darling heart, and darling it truly is – when he said, “Mom, sometime we are kind of scared of you.”

“What? Really?”

“Yeah, like when you yell at us. That’s scary.”

“Well, if you are so scared when I yell, why don’t you just do what I say the first time I say it and be a little more obedient.”

“Hmmm. I don’t know.” And he continued pulling the weeds up. (By the roots, I might add.)

This is why we are meant to be in two parent households. When mom has finally lost her mind, dad gets to step in. He’s all yours, honey. Take it away.

So morning piano practice becomes “mornings with mom and evenings with dad” practice. Math that doesn’t get done when mom has time to help you will now be completed in dad’s office after dinner when he gets home from work and is exhausted and has less patience that I do after battling the strong willed and defiant 7 year old all day long.

But for some reason, the work isn’t so hard when you get to do it with dad.

Go figure.

Let me now list all of this torturous abuse I put this child through. Saxon Math level 2, First Language Lessons Level 1, Zaner-Bloser Handwriting Level 1, piano lessons, and he was required to read one verse of scripture a day.

Grueling, I know. Especially for a kid to whom all this comes so easily.

(Ok, technically he did Life Sciences Level 1 and SOTW: The Ancients with us, too, but he didn’t battle so much against those subjects. But piano practice may actually have felt like torture to him, so there is that.)

There are a lot of things I have learned from this, but one perhaps more applicable to those of you reading this than others.

You know when your kid is so smart, but really hard to motivate to do anything? So you think, well, let’s make this a little easier on both of us. And you skip some of those tedious, seemingly inconsequential math warm ups, flash cards and such? I figured that as long as he knew how to figure out each problem, the repetition of all those fact sheets (25 to 50 math problems a page every single day) would cement the answers into his brain. Surely, the memorization would be easy seeing as the calculating (when he was interested in doing it) was like a game to him.

No. It didn’t work. I am reconciled to the fact that my child naturally gifted in math did not memorize any math fact this year (that may be a slight exaggeration) and we’re going to be stuck writing out math fact families all summer long. He’s got the how-to part down. But that’s only half the work. Now he needs to memorize the answers.

I was that mom who is convinced her child is a genius, and then is really confused and ultimately puts the blame on the teacher when her child is only mediocre, or dare I say, less than in school. Except I was also that teacher.

I’m not sure if I actually did anything wrong though. Does it matter that he will have to do fact families during the summer? I mean, he is smart and he can mentally calculate really well. But he is also really stubborn and defiant. So even though I feel academically he didn’t reach his potential in this one subject this one year, he did learn ever lesson, he completed things he didn’t want to do. Hopefully he learned the value of working things out and the satisfaction of completing a really, really big math book! And we are still friends (and more than friends) at the end of it.

Academics are super important – I am not the mom who tells the kids to play in the backyard and count that as “school.” (But don’t knock those moms, there is something to that! And their kids will probably be our kid’s CEOs some day.) But people matter more than problems.

Even math problems.

So it was hard. But I’m going to tell myself that it won’t be like that forever. He will change. I will change. We will adjust and adapt. We will make it happen – and I believe he will reach his potential.

That is what homeschooling is about, right? Finding the best education for each individual child.

And next year there will be FOUR students. So the fun just never ends over here! 😉

Elementary Biology: Extreme Spring

Even though March Doldrums and April Showers are very real, life does get better when the sun comes out and we can turn the hose back on.

School work starts winding down, jackets are lost and forgotten (even though they are sometimes still very much needed!) and there is so much to learn through experience that we couldn’t do during the cold winter.

This year we are trying to pack in as much spring as we can… and it’s starting to show on my Fitbit! I’m exhausted!

(But very happy!)

And with our four year science cycle landing on biology again this year, we have taken advantage of a lot of our regular spring activities to really help the concepts we are learning sink in.

For instance…

Raising Butterflies

We were supposed to learn about insects back during the winter when we learned about arthropods, but you can’t release butterflies out into the snow! So we saved that for now. I checked out about 12 books about butterflies and caterpillars from the library – some informational and some cute picture books with butterfly protagonists – and the kids pretty much just read those on their own. We watched the caterpillars go from super tiny, to big and fat, to chrysalides, (to chrysalides knocked to the ground,) to fun butterflies we got to release into our yard. (Unfortunately, I probably didn’t wait long enough to order the caterpillars. It poured cats and and dogs and then snowed the next day! But we didn’t hang around for the snow. We were off to our next spring adventure.

That little bugger knocked all the other chrysalides off the lid! 

They look kind of gross.

This guy is almost ready to come out.

Notice the ONE chrysalis on the lid. At least 3 out of the 4 other butterflies survived, even if they had a harder time coming out of their chrysalides.

Spring Break in a Desert Biome

Even though we pretty much go here every spring, it never gets boring. There is too much to do! And this year we convinced some cousins to skip public school and experience homeschool with us! I’m pretty sure they loved it. So on a cold and soggy morning we packed the vans and left in the pouring rain, climbed over the mountains and through the whirling snow, and down into the hot, dry, sandy deserts of Arches and Canyonlands.

Except it wasn’t hot at all. It was freezing. And the violent winds didn’t help any. (My three year old is still traumatized and won’t go outside if it’s even breezy.)

But it was still lovely. And my older kids read all the informational signs and lamented that we didn’t have time to look around the visitor’s center. I kept thinking, why? Don’t you just want to go out and hike and experience it? But really, they wanted to read and learn and figure out what and why and how.

Sometimes I wonder where these brainiacs came from. I was never like that as a child. But the answer is, all kids are like this before learning becomes a chore and being popular becomes the number one goal. Those are two pitfalls of life I have tried to help my kids avoid from the very beginning.

I think it’s working! 😉

There was so much sand and dust in the air. It was hard to get a clear shot of anything from far away. But still, the colors were unbelievable!

I spy an arch!

Mesa Arch – with sand blowing up into our eyes and temps in the upper 40s. Less pleasant, but still spectacular.

Screen Time: Disney Nature Films

But even when you are living it up in the rough cut canyons, the sandstone arches, and the petrified dunes, you have to take a break once in a while. One of the best things we brought on this “extended field trip” were some Disney Nature films from the library.

Now, I strongly dislike Disney. Some people may start throwing stones at me, but I’m not backing down from this one. I just don’t like it in my house. But we LOVE Disney Nature. We’ve owned Oceans for years, and we finally found Earth at the library, but it was too scratched up to watch. But the last few months we’ve discovered Crimson Wing, Bears, Chimpanzee, and Born in China. These are fantastic films with incredible footage and engaging story lines.

If I weren’t so cheap, I would go out and buy them. Maybe, actually, I will go out and buy them. They are that good. (And there are MORE than just those listed here. I’m excited to see the one about wild cats!)

So while the grown-ups packed lunches and picked up after breakfast, the children on our trip (all nine of them) got a little exciting, enchanting, and educational screen time that made them feel positive and motivated after the show ended. That doesn’t happen frequently with screen time. But that is another reason why I love these films.

“Formal” Biology Lessons: Seeds and Flowers

My little kids are finishing up their biology book with a unit on plants. Honestly, I’m having a hard time following any set curriculum very strictly right now. But what’s more fun, anyway? Listening to someone read to you about flowers? Or going outside and discovering them for yourself? (So although I did go through the book, I may have scrimped a little so we could just go and do. This wouldn’t have worked very well if I didn’t already know what I was talking about, but I already know about stamen, pistils, and pollen tubes, so we are good to go. I can just teach from what I know instead of relying on a book to teach all of us at the same time.)

Almonds

Peaches

Pears

Tulip – or target practice for bees!

Some very interesting filaments, stamen, and lots of purple pollen.

Coloring and labeling flower diagrams. I bet you didn’t know flowers had ovaries? So fascinating! I maybe should have been a botanist.

Lima bean plant embryo. Cute! 

Our sunflower starts are dicotyledons. Do you know how you can tell? We decided to examine all the plant starts under the grow lights – and a few plants outside, too. 

Dissecting lima bean and corn seeds and labeling diagrams. 

A Flower Field Trip: The Tulip Festival

Another yearly tradition. And always worth it. (Especially so since we have a family membership so we get in for “free.” I can’t afford to pay $80 to take my children to go look at flowers.) It’s seriously beautiful, though.

And we took all our flower and seed knowledge with us!

Plus, my kids discovered the mid-air jumping photo. So that was awesome.

Hooray! It’s almost summer!

AKB: Roly Polys – The Land Shrimp of the Forest

AKB: Animal Kingdom Book

Slowly, though sometimes somewhat unsteadily, we’ve been working through this Animal Kingdom Book project. What have we done so far, let’s see, Cnidaria, Worms, Mollusks, Echinoderms, and now we are on Arthropods. The author of our biology book has split the study of arthropods into three smaller groups: insects, arachnids, and crustaceans. The insects will have to wait until spring – I cannot with good conscience raise little butterflies now and let them out into below freezing temperatures. That’s just butterfly cruelty. And arachnids? Sick. We got those over as fast as possible. But crustaceans? That sounded like something we would need to go to the Aquarium for.

And we will, don’t you worry. It’s already on the calendar.

But actually, there is a little non-bug buggy thing found all around our house that is technically a crustacean.

The Roly Poly. The Pill Bug. The Potato Bug.

Or, as the bio book author points out, the Isopod.

It’s like a big land shrimp.

You know what, though? That actually makes me think of them as less cute. (Kind of like my reaction to learning about sea stars! *shiver*)

Since it is dead of winter, there weren’t any roly polys outside to be found so we couldn’t dig some up, keep them in a little container, and observe them for awhile like the book suggested.

That takes a two week mini unit down to about one day.

But we did find some fun YouTube videos. (I feel like this is becoming a regular pattern here. Though I’m not complaining. I know when the weather gets warmer and the kids are running barefoot on the grass and dirt again, they’ll find these little potato bugs and tell me some random fact that they learned. Or more likely, they’ll say, “Hey, Mom! Remember that video we watched?” So although the learning isn’t as hands on as I would like, they will still remember and they are still learning. That’s what I tell myself.

I mean, now that you know roly polys are more related to lobsters, crabs, and shrimp than to actual insects, do you think you’ll forget that anytime soon?

(The real question might actually be, do you think you will ever need to know that anytime ever. And the answer is no. But you are smarter! And that is worth something.)

We also wrote little Roly Poly poems in the form of cinquains. My kids thought this was a dumb activity. Therefore, they half heartedly wrote their poems (or in some cases, refused to do it at all) and then promptly just threw them away.

You know what? It was kind of an add activity for a biology lesson. But it was in the bio book and I thought they might like it.

Wrong.

Anyway, here is my poem.

land crustacean

armored, multi-legged

creeping, stalking, waiting

hiding amongst the trees

potato bug

And here is one I remember my dad telling me when I was a little girl. Not any less sinister, but I have fond memories of corralling up as many little critters as I could to show my dad just so he could recite the poem to me again. (I’m sure he got plenty tired of it, too.)

It was a dark and stormy night.

The moon was dipped in blood.

Around the corner murder lay:

A dead potato bug.

The other child who thought a little roly poly art would be fun and worth her time was, surprise surprise, my 3rd grader.

She was just as proud of her cute creation as I am of my recent one. So proud, in fact, that I decided it was best not to bring up the correct way to spell “Roly Poly.” You just don’t want to wipe out cute smiles that like.

Our Animal Kingdom Books and Cnidaria (Jelly Fish and Anemones)

AKB: Animal Kingdom Book

Cnidaria: plural of Cnidarian, pronounced nahy-dair-ee-uh

Interesting useless fact: Thanks to spell check, I just realized I’ve been saying “anemones” wrong my entire life! anenomies. All right. scratch that one. I’ve seen “Finding Nemo” enough, you’d think I’d know this already.

After learning about the human body, the next unit in my elementary children’s biology book covers 7 different animal phyla. Wikipedia tells me there are a total of 34 known animal phyla, while most animals actually fit into just about 9. A phylum is just a classification of life, the sequence being life, domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species.

So we are dealing with pretty diverse groups of animals here.

Also, I have no idea why the book we are making is called “The Animal Kingdom” when we aren’t actually talking about kingdoms. But I’m just going to go with it. It’s been really fun! Plus I’ve learned a lot, too, such as how to say and write anemone. 

For each animal group we have a little information sheet, a lab or two – meaning a hands on experience to help us better understand the featured animal from that group – and a fact sheet the kids get to fill in, color, decorate, and then cut and paste into a physical book they have made out of construction paper. I can update this post with photos of the completed books when they are finished. (So after Christmas and New Years sometime. I’m not spending my vacation time looking up mollusks and echinoderms and such. I’ll be busy reading about Roman conquests and drinking hot chocolate!)

The first phylum we learned about were the cnidaria.

Cnidaria come in two main shapes/forms: the Medusa and the Polyp. It’s easiest to think of it this way.  A medusa has tentacles that flow downward (a jelly fish), and a polyp has tentacles that flow up (an anemone.) Simple as that.

The greatest thing we learned with this phylum was the life cycle of a jelly fish.

Move over butterflies! There’s a new life cycle in town!!

The jellyfish start out as a polyp and grow polyp upon polyp. At some point the top polyp is released and flips over to become a medusa shaped jelly fish. The jelly fish just does it’s thing and then releases an egg or sperm into the ocean. (This was a little unclear. Does the jelly fish release both an egg and sperm? We don’t know yet. But what we do know is that there are jelly fish eggs and jelly fish sperm floating around the ocean. So maybe just think twice before jumping in, you know, if that bothers you.) Eventually the egg and sperm meet and join together, falling down to the ocean floor. Once down below, they start to grow into a new polyp and the cycle starts all over again. For a long time, scientists thought cnidaria were just plants. You know, coral and anemones. They pretty much look just like plants. But nope, they are animals. 

We got to practice the life cycle by making little jelly fish and polyps out of styrofoam cups with pieces of string taped on for the tentacles. First the cup starts out sitting upright on the floor. You stack a few on top of it as it grows. And then eventually you just pop the top one off, flip it upside down, and float it around your living room. We used lima beans to represent the sperm and egg. (Probably not true to size. 😉 ) The jelly fish popped out a gamete and floated away while another little gamete met the first, they stuck together, fell to the ground, and then we started our next polyp growing right there in that spot. Easy peasy.

So… my little kids don’t know what sperm, eggs, and gametes are. I didn’t bother to explain to them how those terms and organisms come into play in the human life cycle. I just didn’t feel like going there quite yet. But they know that it takes an egg and a sperm to have all the information needed to create and grow a new, baby animal and eggs come from moms and sperm come from dads. I pretty much left it at that.

But oh, the conversations heard throughout my house after that!

Just imagine, my little four year old talking to himself from the other room…

“And then the egg and sperm come together! They come together! Plop! Just like that!”

So instead of the conversation, we just had the conversation about not talking about eggs and sperm outside our house!

Boy, that could have been awkward.

*Gasp* What do you even teach your preschool kids in your homeschool!?! 

Relax! It’s biology. It’s natural. (So awkward.)

And I’m dying laughing at the same time.

Anyway, check out our other awesome Animal Kingdom Book pages! This has been a really, really fun unit to work on with my kids. I hope you get to do something like this, too.

ADDENDUM: The science book we are using is purely secular. I really like it, although it being secular has absolutely nothing to do with why I use it. If you are looking for a unit on animal kingdoms that is Christian based, I’ve just heard of one and downloaded it myself to look through later. Take a look if this is something you might be interested in or you feel it would better suit your family’s needs. You can buy the download or hard copy version at Jennyphillips.com/science. Otherwise, I highly recommend R.S.O Life – which also has a try before you buy option (in blue print in the top right hand corner.) Nice!

 

AKB: Echinoderms: The Ultimate Animal (Sea Stars, Cucumbers, and Urchins)

AKB = Animal Kingdom Book

The fourth group of animals we learned about for our Animal Kingdom Book was the echinoderm phylum.

You know, I bet when you think of a sea star, or a sand dollar, you have warm, fuzzy, happy memories of family time at the seaside. It’s all coming back to you now. The salty sea air. The soft and crumbly sand between your toes. The sound of seagulls and crashing waves.

Yeah, well I don’t have warm fuzzy feelings about sea stars anymore.

So just maybe continue at your own risk.

Months ago my kids kept telling me how sea cucumbers shoot out their stomachs when they get scared and then swim away. A babysitter had told them so. I didn’t believe them at all. That sounds ridiculous. And stupid. Unless, I guess, you have more than one stomach or can grow another one pretty fast.

It turns out sea cucumbers are pretty good at regrowing their stomachs.

Out of all the animals we have learned about so far, the echinoderms are the most interesting to me. (My kids are still set on mollusks.)

And, like the mollusks, since I didn’t have any sea cucumbers or sea urchins sitting around for closer examination, we just googled a YouTube video.

And everyone agreed that the video we found was AMAZING!

My first grader has been having so much fun learning about all these different kids of animals, he decided he needed to recap all he knew and drew us this very informative – or at least cute – drawing of examples in the four phylums we’ve studied: Cnidaria, Worm, Mollusk, and Echinoderm.

One of my favorite things about homeschooling is getting to see how excited the kids get about what they are learning. When I see the kids really start to get into something, it is fun to feed and encourage that desire to learn.

Which means I’ve decided to fork out the cash again this year and take the kids back to the aquarium. This time the field trip wont be so random, but will actually fit into what we have been learning.

Plus… homeschool discounts! Ka-Ching!

I just wish he would be this self motivated and excited about his piano lessons. 😉

Animal Kingdom Book: Mollusks/Snails

(Photo Courtesy of FreeDesign – Macro Photography Snail Stock Photo)

The third group of animals we studied for our Animal Kingdom Book was the Mollusk family. Or I guess I should say, the Mollusk Phylum. We learned that some defining characteristics of mollusks include a soft body, a hard shell, and no feet! If you are thinking snails, you’re right. But mollusks also include limpets, octopi, and squids.

My bio book suggested we go outside and find a bunch of snails and keep a little snail home for awhile.

But it’s December. And it is literally freezing outside.

So we just YouTubed a bunch of “Snails for kids” videos and adapted. Even though I feel like I put the least amount of preparation into these lessons – how hard is it to google “snails for kids?” – most of the kids liked this the most.

Here are the videos we watched over the course of 4 days.

This first video is just snails doing their thing put to cute music. Since we didn’t have actual snails to handle and observe, this was probably the next best thing.

This second video I think was trying to make snails cool. I don’t know. It wasn’t our favorite, but it did have some interesting information. Some of the vocabulary was a little over their heads. (I’m doing this with 5 to 8 year olds, remember.)

 

Uh…. my kids loved this video and asked to watch it more than once. But I just couldn’t. If your kids are in to stuff like this, the “Come Outside” series is pretty extensive. Just think! You could be watching this for HOURS!!

 

Everybody loved watching the little baby snails hatch and crawl around. They are so tiny!

This gal has an entire series about how to take care of snails. It was pretty informative. We only watched one or two of her videos. As much as we all love mollusks, I can only do this for so long. Besides the first baby snail video, this is the only other one of her videos we watched.

Animal Kingdom Book: Worms

The second type of animal we studied for our animal kingdom book were worms. It started out with a worm hunt.

After we collected a bunch of worms, we had to observe them, of course. We found segments, blood vessels, heads, tails, little itty bitty hairs on the underside… and that’s about it. Because worms aren’t very complicated.

We talked about how worms are great composters and the benefits of having worms in the garden. We even made a little home for our worms to show how they move around the dirt. It is really hard to see much from these photos (ok, it is really hard to see in real life because the dirt is just a little too muddy) but pretty much all the carrot and lettuce shreds have been incorporated into the dirt/mud. Before and After photos. The complete transformation took a little over a week. Pretty nice!

I will admit, life was a little crazy the last few weeks, so instead of doing a lab to test how worms sense things around them even without eyes, we just watched a Wild Kratts episode on Amazon Prime. “The Mystery of the Squirmy Wormy.” (Holy Cow! You can just watch the whole thing on Youtube. Or right here, if you want. No Amazon Prime required.)

In the end, we covered all the material and information presented in our lab book, even though we didn’t do all the lab experiments.

I didn’t feel like finding more worms and subjecting them to bright, hot lights or stinky vinegar just so the kids could see that worms prefer cold, dark, wet places. We kind of already figured that out. Plus, NOBODY likes the smell of vinegar, be it worm or non worm. Better to just let the worms lie in their mud in peace.

You know, after I’d let a bunch of children rip those poor peaceful creatures out of their homes and poke, prod, and handle them as if they were nothing more than science specimens, a dime a dozen. Or free from the backyard.

I guess I’m not that much of a worm advocate after all.

There are lots and lots of books about worms out there, but my favorite is Wiggling Worms at work. Although we didn’t check out this book at the library for our biology worm chapter (I already have 96 books currently checked out right now), we’ve read this many times and is a great book to have on hand for any other wormy adventures.

Next up, mollusks!

I’m not sure how excited I am about that actually. Worms are easy to find. But how do I get a hold of snails? Well, I better figure that out soon.

Happy Worm Hunting.

Small Successes and a Trip to the Zoo

I hate strongly dislike going to the zoo when it is hot and crowded. But going in November when it’s 32 degrees and all the other kids are safe and warm in their classrooms?

Yep! That’s the time for us!

Yes, it was freezing!! But it was awesome. There was a private school field trip at the zoo the same time we were there, but I think they had about 50 kids total and they left after an hour and a half.

How long did we brave the cold?

5 hours!

Because we are crazy.

And the animals, I think, like it better when there are less people there, too. The elephants did a little show just for us. The polar bears were so funny! We got to watch the zookeepers feed the gorillas and the orangutans. The sea lions showed us their head stands. The turtles were actually moving. And the tiger humored us by lifting his head a few times so we could see him better.

And the lions?

Well, one of them came right up to say hello. Beautiful. And terrifying at the same time.

They probably could have made that glass a little thicker, just for my nerves’ sake.

The greatest homeschool success of the day was that we actually remembered our nature journals! It is my great dream in life to have a homeschool full of beautifully detailed and impressively painted nature journals to tout around town and show people when they ask how our homeschool is going. I remember first hearing about nature journaling – and the entire Charlotte Mason method of homeschooling – and thinking THAT is what I want to do.

Just look at these awesome examples! Can you imagine teaching and rearing your children to be able to independently produce something like one of these! To be able to carefully observe, record, ask questions, find answers, and investigate? Not to mention to be reverent, respectful, and find peace and joy in the world God has created for us? (Ok, one or more of them might be from a mom, but still. It’s the concept.) (PS. All of these just came from a google search of “nature journal examples homeschool.”)

But up until last week, I don’t know that we’ve ever successfully taken our nature journals out with us anywhere.

Because I always forgot to bring them.

And secretly, I am afraid that if I try to make my kids sit down and observe nature – like a leaf – they will revolt and get up and run away. I like that they run and play in the trees. I like that investigate and explore kinesthetically, too. So I always have this inner battle of whether I should hand them their notebooks, some colored pencils or watercolors, and sit them down in front of a flower or a bug, or whether I should just let them run and jump and pick wildflowers and dig in the dirt. Usually, the decision is already made for me by the time we get outside – they are ready to play.

And I always forget to bring the nature journals.

But I’m working on it. See? This time, I brought them!

AND we remembered pencils, too.

Instead of requiring them to pick an animal or two to sketch, at each animal in which they took a special interest, I asked them if they would like their notebook and a pencil.

Here are the results…

From the preschooler – a colobus monkey

Spider Monkey

 

A lion named Ba’ Shush (this is not the real lion’s name, but he renamed the zoo lion after his stuffed animal lion at home that he had named when he was 2 years old.)

From my 1st grader: An unnamed lion. He wanted it to be a boy lion, so he drew the shaggy mane on her, even though he knew it wasn’t accurate.

An Amur leopard

From my 3rd grader: lions (they were the big hit of the day.)

Another Amur leopard.

And an ostrich.

 

And from my 5th grader:

Nothing. He didn’t sketch anything.

But the other night he made this great sketch of some ancient Greek cyclops warriors!

That’s got to count for something.

So, maybe we aren’t quite up to par with the nature journal examples I copied and pasted up above. But we’re making progress.

Baby steps.

You know, if you can’t celebrate the little successes, this homeschooling business is going to be really, really hard.

The next nature journal challenge will be sitting the children down in front of a leaf and seeing what they can come up with!

Calling in the Experts: Frog Dissection

Because honestly, if I had to take care of this all on my own, it wouldn’t have been as cool, it would have taken at least twice as long, and I may have actually puked.

My son dissected a frog.

Thank goodness our friend and neighbor is a high school biology teacher who knows his way around the insides of amphibians.

Homeschooling moms like to emphasize to their kids not just the information they are supposed to know, but how to get information if it isn’t just laid out for them in a book on their lap. And on top of that, the kids need to know how to discern between accurate, credible information and biased or just plain false information. (You can actually learn a lot from biased info – like various personal or cultural perceptions, etc., but you can’t get anything beneficial really from something that is just plain wrong.)

Beside the internet – which is full of awesome tools like homeschooling blogs *wink wink* as well as a bunch of rotten junk – there are actual living human beings with stores of knowledge that they are happy and willing to share with people who really are interested in learning. It’s a great idea to ask a neighbor or associate to share some knowledge with your kids. And besides learning the subject matter, the children learn how to appropriately interact with people, how to ask questions, and how to speak face to face as opposed to via a screen. (That particular skill is becoming more and more important – and rare – as screens are becoming our culture’s communication medium of choice.)

And unlike the internet, I wasn’t worried about our neighbor misleading my son.

It was just a frog dissection, after all.

Ew.

And yet, so cool at the same time.

Our neighbor walked my son through all the snips and pokes and pointed out the more important organs, as well as ask some really interesting questions. And I was really pleased (also extremely relieved! *phew*) that my 5th grader could answer the questions correctly.  Well, all except one. (Why would the arteries big bigger and have thicker and stronger walls than the veins? If you can’t figure it out, let me and I’ll have my 5th grader tell you. He didn’t know before last night, but he sure knows now!)

My son’s bio knowledge is pretty good. Now we just need to work on giving answers that are more than 2 words long. Laconic even, you might say.

Nobody’s perfect. Especially in 5th grade.

(At least he can express himself without relying on emojis or insert #savethefrogs or #biorules or # anything into his conversations.)

Photos below. View at your own risk!

They aren’t that bad. But I did feel a little nauseated after we were all done.

These are two little frog eggs out of the thousands or so inside our frog. We tried to look at them under the microscope, but there really wasn’t much to see. 

This is me thinking I might throw up. I didn’t. But I did have to lay down afterwards.