Science is for the Birds, or about the Birds

We wrapped up our science studies about Birds today and I thought I would share some of the resources we've used the past few weeks. For our main book we use God's Design for Life: The Animal Kingdom. We had our great field trip to see birds of prey at the Timpanogos Visitor's Center a few weeks ago. Last week we studied bird's digestion systems, and had great fun disecting virtual owl pellets at KidWings. I'm thinking we'll order some real owl pellets in the future, but for now the virtual pellets were excellent. This week we studied bird's eggs and used a lesson from the Hutchings Museum in Lehi, Utah. We will be visiting this museum tomorrow night for its "A Night in the Museum" event.

Pictures of Birds from our Zoo visit:

Long-Eared Owl- When we first stopped to look at him he was really very slender, but as we stayed he started puffing up his feather to make himself look bigger and fierce. It was fun to watch.

Kestrel

Eastern Skreech Owl

Wild Turkeys
White Pelicans

Outdoor Hour Challenge #50- Skunks & Badgers

Outdoor Hour Challenge #50- Skunks & Badgers

We watched the PBS Nature show- Is That Skunk? to the delight of my kids who enjoyed it enough to watch a second time, as well as read from our Burgess Animal Book, watched youtube videos about badgers, and made our notebook pages.

Nyah's:

Austin's:

We also had the wonderful opportunity to go to Utah's Hogle Zoo for the free home school day. While seeing incredible animals like elephants, rhinos, and giraffes is always amazing, I was excited to check out the animals we have been studying. Some of these animals were off-exhibit for winter (Marmots); Others were hiding in their homes (spotted skunk, prairie dogs); And others I wasn't able to get a good picture of because of my camera. I don't know what my toddler did with it, but in addition to not focusing up close, it also isn't focusing if the flash is off which made getting pictures of the bats a horrible experince, as you will see, and sometimes just has a hard time focusing at all (cottontail rabbits). I haven't decided what to do about it (fix it or work out getting a new one) so everyone will have to endure slightly out of focus pictures for a time.

Striped Skunk-- he had a lot of brown on his tail where the white stripe should have been, which is why Nyah used brown in her notebook page. He did have the white stripe on his head and back. When he saw us, he quickly turned around and stuck his tail in the air, alarming the kids. I would guess he's been descented, but I don't know for sure.

This little creature is a wild weasel, as in NOT part of the zoo's animals, but a weasel living on zoo property. I watched him running around the playground with the kids before asking a zookeeper what he was. I was surprised at his size as I've always imagined weasels to be bigger. He was smaller than a ferret you might see at a pet store.

Harris' Antelope Squirrel

I promise there is a cotton-tail rabbit in there somewhere.

The rest of the pictures were of the short-tailed leaf-nosed bats. Their enclosure was in a cave-like exhibit which meant my flash kept going off and reflecting on the glass, but as I mentioned, when I turned off the flash the camera wouldn't focus. We arrived at the bats just as breakfast was being put out and the light inside the enclosure was on, which hasn't been the case in our pst visits. We spent lots of time watching them flying around, perching on the walls, ceiling, and branches. We watched them devour the bananas before all the other fruits, we saw one walking around on the ground, and lots more. It was fascinating. Too bad the pictures don't show it!!

With the flash- bats are in focus, but huge glare on glass.

Without flash- no glare, no focus.

No flash again

With flash

More Winter Insects--Burlese Funnel

What is a Burlese Funnel? According to the book we have been using it is an insect strainer to examine insects who may be wintering in the soil. ". . . an effective tool for capturing insects that live in the soil, or decaying leaves."

Picture from book:

The one we made:
I didn't want to use my kitchen funnel so I cut off the top of a soda bottle. I also didn't have any wire mesh on hand (add to shopping list, right? maybe not) so I used a double layer of cheesecloth held into place with one of my girls' hair elastics. The book suggests to use rubbing alcohol in the jar, but then says "If you do not want to kill the insects, use water instead of the alcohol." Which I think is a pretty silly thing to say because our lone insect drowned very well in the water.

How it works: Put soil into the funnel, place light above funnel and leave on for 6 hours. "The insects in the soil will move down the funnel away from the heat toward moisture and tumble into the alcohol."

Our results: Yes, you read correctly above, we only managed to have one insect tumble out of our funnel. Our insect was about half a centimeter long, and millipedie-ish, earwig-ish looking due to the many legs. As I mentioned he drowned in the water and when we tried pulling him out to examine him further, his body fell apart. Apparently he shoudln't have been left in the water sooo long. The books suggests "If you don't find any insects, try again with soil from another place. Beneath a tree is a good place to find soil containing insects." We have been trying soil from 4 different areas of our yard all week long, and no luck.
Hypothesis of why it didn't work: No bugs in the ground (obviously), but why? Not fertile enough to attract bugs, too wet, the weather warmed up so all insects wintering came out, though they probably regretted it with the snow today.

I think we will try again, but I plan on collecting some soil samples from our nature walk this weekend to use. So I'll update when/if we have better results.

Winter Insects--Week 6

I'll start by apologizing for some of the pictures--my camera claims to be "all weather" but apparently it can't weather my toddler who I caught playing with the lens and now it won't focus when I'm trying to take a picture up close. We read through parts of the chapter from Discover Nature in Winter, but especially looked at the pictures together. Because our yard isn't landscaped we knew we would be able to look under rocks, leaves, composting weeds, and whatever else may be in our yard. We also looked at tree and bush branches, but we didn't find anything in these. Also, we didn't find much in the way of wintering insects, most of them were out and moving about (or not an insect at all).

Nyah and her trash, um, collection. Austin reading.

Our first find was a beetle under a rock. It is the blackish spot in the middle of the picture. If you click on the picture you can see it better, and also that is is more of a green color.
Unfortunately our yard is the lowest point on our street with the two houses to our right, and the two houses to our left, draining into our yard. So under a number of rocks we found mold growing, though it looks like it could be spider web. There were also some small aphid looking bugs, not exactly like aphids, but very similar.
Not a bug, but an earthworm- the whitish skinny thing next to the bigger stick.

Also not a bug, but a slug sticking to a rock. We saw plenty of these.

Under some leaves we found some tiny, black bugs. They are the black spots on the green weed in the center of the picture, and the leaf above and to the left of the weed.

Our biggest finds were under trash--cardboard boxes, paper plates, newspapers, apparently

our low point on the street means we get all the trash blown into our yard as well. This is a cricket by my fingertips. Around our front steps and concrete foundation we found a number of holes, probably leading to burrows of some kind.

A beetle, found under a cardboard box, in the company of several crickets, but they had the sense to dive for cover.

At the first sight of bugs Olivia headed for the stairs. She started to cry when the older two were trying to catch a cricket, and only came down when they had headed in a different direction.

There are two black spiders in this picture, see if you can find them.

We also found some more winter weeds. These two are both "mean" or so my kids say because of the thorns/stickers. This first one is a thistle, it has beautiful purple flowers when it blooms, but as you can see it would be crazy to try to pick one. I have no idea what this one is, but I've grown up calling it a sticker bush, and I had to pull some thorns out of my hand from touching one of these on our insect walk.

Antonio Vivaldi

We are currently studying Antonio Vivaldi. This is the first composer my kids have really been interested in (we have done several others in the past) and I think it is due to some new resources we found.

A great website is Classics for Kids which has the Classics for Kids radio programs available, as well as musical selections, biography information, etc. on a number of composers. You can find Antonio Vivaldi here. The archive of radio programs are here.

There is a great audio CD series called Classical Kids which my kids have loved and listened to over and over. Even Kurt and I have enjoyed listening to it. The one for Antonio Vivaldi is call "Vivaldi's Ring of Mystery." It is about a young orphan girl named Katarina who is coming to the orphanage where Vivaldi was the music director. With the help of Giovanni, a gondolier she meets when arriving in Venice, she searches for clues to her mysterious past. The story is set to exerpts from Vivaldi's music. The link above should take you to the Amazon page that lists all of the titles in this series.

I also always try to find a good book for my kids to read about the composer we are studying. I prefer to find one that is not just a dry biography with names, dates, and places. For Vivaldi I found a great book called I, Vivaldi by Janice Shefelman which gives biography information told from Vivaldi's viewpoint of his mother's promise at the time of his birth that he would be a priest if he lived, and his own desire to be a musician. We have enjoyed the Getting to Know the World's Greatest Composers series by Mike Venezia in the past, but he hasn't written one for Vivaldi. He also does a series called Getting to Know the World's Greatest Artists. What I like about his series is they are written for kids and so leave out all the adult details, personal relationship stuff of the composer/artists life that kids don't need to know.

I also pick a few selections of the composers music that I want them to be familiar with. For Vivaldi I picked The Four Seasons, because we already own a cd of that music. I play the music while we are doing school assignments or eating lunch or in the car or whenever. Libraries are a great resource for music and videos, as well as books. Whatever you don't have to buy keeps that much more money in your pocket.

Museum of Ancient Life

Family trip to Museum of Ancient Life at Thanksgiving Point. Dinosaurs were once a very big part of our everyday life, and so the kids continue to have a great interest in this subject.

Dimetrodon:

Stegosaurus lunch-- I didn't get the name of the crocodilian creatures.
Brachiosaurus head, which is about as much of this creature to fit into my camera frame at one time.
Utahraptor- a local guy

This display was fascinating! The one with the long teeth belongs to a walrus, and you should be able to find the human skull at the top-right.

Psittacosaurus:

What dinosaur museum would be complete without T-Rex?

The large guy is Eremotherium, a sloth-like creature. Seriously, freaky looking sloth. The small guy is Castroides, a beaver-like creature with some incredible teeth. Can you imagine what kind of trees he was chopping down? With a recent study of beavers the kids were really interested in him.

Smilodon- Or Saber-toothed Tiger to my kids and us common folk who can't remember all these fancy names.

Elephas

I love it!!

I recently posted about our Valentine's Day activity of watching a bird-of-prey presentation, and today the kids have been using our stuffed birds to give their own presentation to an imaginary kid audience. Once in a while they ask me to clarify some fact they aren't sure they remember correctly, and then go on with their show. It is fun to see them "narrating" what they learned.

Outdoor Hour Challenge #49- Bats

#49 Bats

The kids enjoed watching the youtube video & the Jeff Corwin video, as well as listenting to the hapter in the Burgess Animal Book about the bats. When it was time to do our notebook pages, Austin focused on vampire bats, something he was interested in a couple years ago. Nyah asked if bats can fly to the moon.

Austin's:

Nyah's:
Some pictures from our Outdoor Hour walk this week. It was a beautiful day, except for the freezing wind, which made Austin keep stopping and curling up in a ball in the ground. No matter how many times I told him he would stay warm if he kept moving, and that the only way to get home to get warm was to keep going, he would plop down and huddle in the snow.

Bird Tracks

Common sunflowers, a favorite with the songbirds, who fly away as soon as we are in sight. The kids had quite a bit of fun chasing after them to scare them away. As I mentioned in my post for Winter Wednesday, we usually catch sight of a bird-of-prey and the songbirds are all hidden, but on this day the bird-of-prey was absent and the songbirds were out in force. We were able to identify magpies and house finches.

Can't keep them out of the trees, though truthfully, I certainly don't try.

I actually found myself up a tree to examine one of the nests we found. Here is a picture:

A picture after I've cleared out some of the sticks. See the mud that has been used to line the inside? I wonder what bird built this nest.

As a follow-up to the Winter Wednesday about trees/berries, we took the time to examine the Utah Junipers, and discuss which may be male or female. This one, heavily laden with berries, was definitely female.