Captivating Clouds

We used Shining Dawn Book's Captivating Clouds nature study this week. It's been a good week for clouds here. We have learned to identify each type of cloud along with the prefixes that tell us the altitude of the clouds. Monday was a good day for looking at shapes in the clouds since we had large cumulus clouds everywhere. The boys made cotton ball models of the 3 main types of clouds at the 3 different altitudes. We talked more about the water cycle (we had already discussed this with our creek study) and evaporation. We made it rain in a bottle and talked about the different types of precipitation. Tomorrow the boys will practice being meteorologist's and give me the weather forecast for the day. Here are some pictures of our journey:


Cumulus Clouds:Cirrus Clouds:
Cumulus Clouds:
The boys filled out one of these sheets for each day of the week about the cloud type and weather along with a drawing of the clouds for that day.

Their cotton ball models of the cloud types:The "making rain" experiment:

Habitat activity

We are using Apologia's Zoology 3 book this year for science. I really enjoying using the Apologia books as a read aloud and doing the notebooking and other activities together. I am learning so much along with the boys. For this activity, we were learning how habitat and camoflauge effect the life cycles of an animal. We tore different colors of construction paper into pieces and mixed them into a laundry basket. Then we mixed M&Ms in with the torn paper. The boys had 1 minute to find as many M&Ms as they could. Then we counted them and subtracted from what we started out with to see which color had the most "survive" in that habitat.

Of course, when we were done, none of the M&Ms "survived". :) They were all eaten!

Incredible Creeks

We are using Shining Dawn books Incredible Creeks this week and probably next week. So far we've enjoyed the exploration of our own creek, although there aren't many places that are easily accessible to the water. However, we are hoping to explore a local river this weekend when we go camping. We like these nature studies because we can pick and choose what fits best for our family. So far, here are the things we have done:

-Read The Raft by Jim Lamarche
-Discussed other words for "creek" including brook, stream, and river.
- We talked about how all creeks flow to larger creeks or rivers and they all eventually flow into the ocean. We looked at a local map to see where our creek flows - it eventually gets to the Wabash River, which flows to the Ohio River which flows to the Mississippi, which flows to the Gulf of Mexico!
- Drew pictures of the water cycle to help us understand the process. Isn't it amazing to understand that some of the water flowing in our creek was here hundreds of years ago?
- We made underwater viewfinders to use at the creek, although our creek is so clear and shallow right now that we really didn't need the viewfinders.


- While at the creek yesterday, we took a water sample and brought it home to look at it under the microscope. Unfortunately, we didn't see any microscopic animals. We'll try again at another creek.
- We observed the rocks and the smoothness of them from the water's current.

- We observed the things floating in the water and the vegetation growing on the banks of the creek.


- We observed the living things in the creek - leeches, crawdads and small fish.


Today it's raining, so we won't be down at the creek, but we will look at some paintings by Monet of rivers and read a poem by Emily Dickinson, "The Sea Said 'Come' To the Brook".