Tera's candy giraffe
Daniel's little man
Before
AfterA couple of our homeschooling friends came over yesterday, Sarah and Amanda with their kids to participate in our unit. JP dissected a worm for the kids. As much as I don't like dissection, it was really interesting. We had a diagram in our science teacher's edition and it was easier than I thought to find all the parts on the not so alive specimen. All the kids made A Winter Count, which is a Native American pictoral calendar. So they drew 12 pictures to represent things that they had done in the past year. I didn't get any pictures but I thought they did a great job. I did a demonstration I found online called Delicious Classification, where you use candy to symbolize the different animal groups. For example, a junior mint represented an insect because it has a hard shell (exoskeleton) and gooey insides. A twizzler was a worm and so on. Then the kids receive a bag of candy pieces and made their own creatures. They turned out really well. We had lots of giraffes, candy men, a dog, a worm and some other things I can't remember now. We played a game called Animal Antics-boys against girls. It too dealt with classifying vertebrates and invertebrates. We ended with lunch, kids playing and adults talking. It was a great time and I was excited that all the kids were into the activities and participated.