Nature Study: Birds

Hi guys! Today I wanted to share with you our second nature study unit. This time our focus was all things birds. Here are some of the fun activities we worked on.

Some of the books we used during this unit study

Using the Nature Anatomy book the boys drew and labelled the different parts of a bird

We also learned about the 5 basic types of bird feathers. 

Bird nests. I asked the boys to pick 4 of their favorite type of nest. 

We also played this really fun bird bingo game. 

Bird bingo in action

Anatomy of an egg.

To go with what we learned about an egg we did this fun experiment. 

If you look really closely you can see some blue where the food color was absorbed. 

My water wasn't as dark blue as I would have liked it because I ran out of food coloring but the boys were able to see some result. 

We watched Bill Nye birds to help with our unit study

We also watched Magic School Bus cracks a yolk. 

Bee Nature Study

Hi guys! Today I wanted to share with you one of our recent nature study units. We will be doing several units during the spring/summer months. The first unit we started with was all about bees. Here are some of the fun activities we worked on.

Who lives in a colony?

The boys drew the members in a colony (Queen, worker bee, and drone).

Anatomy of a worker Bee:

we focused on the wings, compound eyes, and stinger of a worker bee. We used 

bubble wrap to represent the compound eyes, parchment paper for the wings, and we learned that a worker bee has a barbed stinger. 

Life Cycle of a bee:

 

this was a fun hands on way to represent the life cycle. We used a grain of rice for the egg, and a cotton ball for the pupa.

We also did several activities from this book. 

This was a short mini unit on bees, since we covered all about bees already. Do you guys enjoy nature studies in your homeschool?

Shark Anatomy

Hi guys! Today I wanted to share with you a really cool hands on activity we did to go with our shark unit study.

We first used this shark model to explore all the inside parts of a shark (stomach, liver, fins, etc.)

here is a video of the boys putting the model back together. 

Once they were done exploring and playing with the shark model, I had them draw and label the shark. 

They used the book Insiders: Sharks to write their narrations from.

We used a blue chalk pastel to add a decorative element to their work. 

Both boys completed work. 

This was a really fun project and helped the boys see what the shark's insides look like. My 8 year old really enjoyed putting the model together.

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