Owl Pellet Photo Journal

Today we took out the owl pellet that we had bought on a homeschool shopping trip with my friend awhile back. I wanted to wait until we had finished our chapter on ecosystems which also covers adaptations.

We will also be working on chapters coming up that have to do with anatomy, so it was a perfect linking exercise into that as well.

The owl pellet itself is an ecosystem for smaller insects like a moth - interesting! The pellet had a guaranteed entire skeleton of a starling bird inside. 

The following is a photo-journal experience of the kids opening up the pellet and finding the feathers and the bones of the starling. 

Starling skull

Brother trying to determine a bone part. 

Brother sketching the bird claw and making observations...

Piecing the skull and vertebrae together with the hip bone.

week's goals

Last week was me at my minimum with the kids. Flexibility of starting right away is being able to take breaks if I need to...I had lots of school work and writing projects that I had to speed through all week to not feel behind! It was good to work but I am spending time this morning re-organizing.

Fae will be given her social studies book.

We are alternating between science and social studies during the week.

This article is really helpful to explain the Charlotte Mason style of learning nature (what kids really need to be learning at this age). The purpose is to build observation skills, familiarize with note-taking, labeling, etc. Note that mom keeps lectures to a minimum in nature and prompts the child to make his or her own observations with gentle questions. I love it. We will be dabbling in a science text when we are inside to learn the parts of a plant. We are going out to observe our garden outside. Some lettuces are ready for picking and our plants are getting big! We are waiting on tomatoes, carrots, cucumbers, onions, and we unfortunately had tons of pigweed we had to pick and it killed our bell peppers :(

Charlotte Mason style:

http://www.squidoo.com/cmnaturestudy

and

Nature Journaling

I'm also going to be sending the kids links for math work from softschools.com and making decisions about our long term math format - online resource or textbook or both. I also found an awesome app that includes teaching, practice, and more practice that is really promising.