Japan

The setting in Grandfather's Journey is California and Japan.  So, this week we studied Japan some.  We made a small lapbook, nothing outrageous, so I will pass on posting pictures.  It consisted of a Continent book, the flag of Japan, a little Japanese culture and 4 generation books.  It was fun to watch the boys try to remember the first names of their grandparents and great-grandparents.  We also learned how to write a Haiku poem.  Scholastic is having a contest for 2-6 graders' Haiku poems.  Even though Nicolas could not enter, he wrote his own Haiku.  A Haiku poem consists of 3 non-rhyming lines - the first line 5 syllables, the second 7 and the last line 5.  Here are their poems.

Alex's
Extinct animals
That would be so sad to me
I want to save them

Nicolas's
Learning is so fun
I want to learn more in school
I want to be smart.

 

Grandfather's Journey co-op

Our co-op today was on the story Grandfather's Journey by Allen Say.  It's about a boy's grandfather who lived in Japan and moved to California.  He missed Japan and moved back to Japan, then moved back to California.  The boy, when he grew up, also had lived in both places and understood how his grandfather felt, while in one country, he missed the other.  The grandfather kept song birds, so for one of our lessons, a lady from a local pet store visited the co-op and brought several birds with her.  Almost all of them the children could touch and hold.  Here are some pictures of my boys.

Holding a cockatiel.

Some kind of chicken.

Holding a baby duck - reminded us of The Story of Ping.

Maccaw Parrot.

Another kind of parrot who wasn't being cooperative.  He liked to stay on one person and wouldn't go to the kids hands.

The songbirds that cannot be held.

After handling the birds, we made an origami bird mobile.  Since we've been home this afternoon, the boys have made their own origami birds and even paper cages to keep them in.  They really want a bird, but I think it's just a phase at this point because they had so much fun with them today.  We are NOT getting a bird.  We already have a zoo here!

 

Tigers

Since we have been reading The Magic Tree House books as our read-alouds this year, I try to incorporate some of what we read into  unit study, if we have time.  We seldom end up doing a lapbook.  But, while reading Tigers at Twilight, I decided it might be fun to study tigers and large cats - especially after coming off Andy and the Lion last week, our co-op book.  Since homeschoolshare had a lapbook on tigers, we checked books out from the library and went for it!  Here is the result:

Inside some of the books:

Above from Nicolas's book.  Below from Alex's book:

The boys got a magazine subscription to Ranger Rick from their aunt for Christmas.  We got our current issue on Thursday of our tiger week - and the cover story was on tigers!  The boys spent the afternoons after studying tigers, playing tigers.  They walked around on all fours growling and play fighting like big cats would do. 

It was sad to learn how endangered the animals are and seeing how few there are left in the wild.  Also, we saw a couple pictures of tigers that are now extinct.  How sad!

Maple Syrup field trip

At the end of our week-long unit study on maple syrup, we went to Minnetrista Center for a presentation on maple syrup.  After a puppet show talking about maple syrup, tapping and trees, we walked outside (brrr...) where they had a tap into a tree.  The sap wasn't flowing when we were there because it was too cold, but we could see the sap that had come from the tree previously, frozen in the jug.

They used PVC pipe and an old milk jug.

Each child got to try their hand at an auger (or hand powered drill) on a tree that was close to death.

Alex drilling above and Nicolas below.

Then we went to the fire where they were boiling the sap.  She explained how the Indians would heat up a rock and put it into the sap to evaporate it, because they used gourd bowls that would catch fire over an open flame. 

For craft time, each child made their own tree trunk out of construction paper, poked a hole for the spile (a piece of plastic straw), and hung their bucket from the spile.  The buckets were bottle caps with a wire for the handle.

They gave us a taste test to see if we could tell real maple syrup from the kind we usually buy at the stores.  Most kids did pretty good at guessing correctly.

Even though the day was pretty cold and very windy, we still had a good time.  The only 2 dissappointments were not seeing the sap actually flowing that day and not getting to taste the sap directly out the tree.

Maple Syrup Unit Study and Lapbook

'Tis that time of year when the sap begins to flow in the trees.  We studied maple syrup this week and had a great time as well as learned a lot.  (Unit study from homeschoolshare)  We decided to try something new and make just one lapbook.  It worked out well, and I felt like we did more learning and less "mom trying to help both boys at the same time cut, glue and write".

Starting inside the book, we looked at what a Maple tree looked like, the life cycle of a maple tree and the symmetry of different parts of the tree.

Nicolas's tree on the left and Alex's on the right.  We labeled the canopy of leaves, branches, trunk, roots, seed and leaf.

Alex did the sprout and seed, and Nicolas did the bud and leaf.  (He had a little help with the leaf, but the bud all by himself.)

We moved on then to what trees could be tapped.  We looked each tree up in the Audobon book of trees and learned just a little about each one.
Sycamore - one of largest hardwoods
Box Elder - also called the ash leaf maple
Buckeye - Ohio state tree
Sugar maple - colorful in the fall and used most for maple syrup
Red maple - Pioneers made ink from this tree
Silver maple - named because the backs of the leaves are silvery; very brittle tree

We looked at where maple syrup is produced and what tools are used for tapping.  When we talked about the actual process of making maple syrup and read some books from the library about it.  We also talked about what temperature it had to be outside for the sap to flow, then we charted the temperature.

We did the snow experiment, because we just happened to get some snow during the week.  On the left, Nicolas colored how many inches of snow we had in a canning jar, then the middle each boy guessed how much water it would be when the snow melted (Red is Alex's guess, blue Nicolas's).  Then on the far right, Alex colored in how much water we actually had when it was melted.

When we went grocery shopping, we bought real maple syrup and made pancakes the next day for lunch.  We tried to make Jack Wax - a candy made from hot maple syrup poured into the snow where it hardens like a taffy.  It didn't work for us, so I'm pretty sure we did something wrong!  Nicolas did a copywork of a poem (well, all he could fit on the paper.)