Letter B Week

Bravo for the Brilliant Letter B!

We had a great second week of school.  We still have not added in all of our subjects, but we are increasing at a pace that seems right for Arin.  She is loving school.  She asks for school everyday, which is a great thing!  She loves our hands-on activities and she loves her book work with the exception of Explode the Code.  She does not care for this work too much.  We still do it, but on a slower pace than if she loved it. 

This week we worked on the letter Bb.  We chose birds as our main Bb subject.

I printed out an uppercase letter B for both girls.  You can find the worksheet here.  Then, the girls painted the B with white school glue and sprinkled birdseed on it. 

We read the following bird related books:

Crinkleroot’s 25 Birds Every Child Should Know by Jim Arnosky

Ben, Billy, and the Birdhouse by Cecilia Minden

What Do You Call a Group of Turkeys? by Emma Nathan

I Like Weird Animals: Weird Birds by Carmen Bredeson

Birds by Adele Richardson

Mouse & Mole: Fine Feathered Friends by Wong Herbert Yee

We learned some fun facts about birds:

- they are warm-blooded

- they are vertebrates

- they do not have teeth

- birds that fly have hollow bones, birds that do not fly have solid bones

- they lay eggs

- birds have more neck vertebrae than any other animal

- the hummingbird is the smallest bird and also the only one that can fly backwards, up, down, and even hover in mid-air and it lays two eggs at a time

- all birds have feathers and they are the only animal that does

We also watched a bird dvd several times during the week.  We watched Animal Life for Children: All About Birds.  My girls both loved this movie.  It is the second movie that we've watched in this series and they have both kept the girls attention.  I love enjoyable educational videos!

Arin completed a bird maze (help the flamingo to its food).  The maze can be found here.

I printed out a Bird Skeleton fact sheet from here.  I read the worksheet to Arin and we talked about the different bones and their names.

We also read a little about eggs from here.

Then, we worked on an egg experiment.  Arin filled one glass with water and a second glass with white vinegar.  Then she dropped one egg in each glass.  We kept an eye on each egg over the next 24 hours.  The egg that was dropped in the vinegar was covered with tiny bubbles and was floating, the other egg was sunk to the bottom of the glass.  After the 24 hours was up, we removed both eggs (not sure why I didn't take a side-by-side of the eggs).  There was no change in the water soaked egg, but the shell of the vinegar soaked shell was much different.  The egg felt rubbery, much like a water balloon.  We found this experiment in the book called 365 Simple Science Experiments. In the book, it said that if the egg was dropped in the sink, it would bounce.  We had six people here wanting to see the experiment, so Arin dropped the egg on the kitchen counter so everyone could see.  The egg did not bounce (perhaps we should have removed it from the vinegar sooner???).  It immediately went SPLAT!  It felt like a water balloon and it popped like a water balloon (and check out the shell once it was busted open).  If you do this experiment, I suggest dropping the eggs in the sink, so you don't have the mess on the counters.

We also printed some bird guides for the girls from here.