Wild Days in the Animal Kingdom

We have been doing some really interesting things with our unit studies. Science is not my strong point, so I've really been stretched as we've studied animal classification. Thanks to Jessica Hulcy (Konos author) and the other Konos moms for the tips and encouragement. As a side note, Mrs. Jessica was in an awful car accident last week and suffered some very serious injuries, including broken ribs, torn diaphram and punctured lungs. Please be praying for her as the Lord is healing her a little every day. You can visit her Caring Bridge site here.

The character trait we are working on for this unit is orderliness. God has created an orderly universe and it is so evident in all of nature. First let me say that I am not orderly by nature. In fact, keeping entropy (I love this word) at bay is a great challenge for me. God is truly working on me as I work on training my children to tame the clutter that invades our home.

Animal classification has been wild in more ways than one. Oh the stories I can tell. We began our unit with the Tree of Life. I was not at all sure how this would turn out, but have been very happy with the results.

I used a seperate posterboard for each phylum, adding a picture and characteristics (given by the boys) as we studied each one. This worked well because it gave them a quick reference when they went to write about any given phylum. Learning the classification system was fun. I even made up a rap to help them remember Kingdom, Phylum, Class.... Anyone want to hear it? I'll spare you, but they won't ever forget what comes next.

We collected earthworms to observe, and tried to count their segments. The most fun came on a day when we were babysitting my 2 year old god-daughter. She was thrilled beyond belief that she could hold the worms and look at them with the magnifying glass. The following week when she came over she looked at our Tree of Life and pointed to the worms. She wanted to see more!

Things began to get creepy when we tried to combine this unit with lunch. As we were studying mollusks we decided to purchase fresh clams. We observed them, watched them shoot out water when touched, close when they felt threatened, looked at all parts etc... All was fine until I cooked them. They looked great. I prepared them in a garlic and wine sauce and tossed with pasta. Sounds good doesn't it? What we discovered is that you can't eat science projects and that we need our food to be dead before it comes into our home. Just know that we will not be purchasing any more food that has to be killed before eaten. We just couldn't do it. A lot of food went to waste that day.

I would have liked to look at more insects but the boys were not okay with "putting them to sleep". The one thing we have actually mounted on a foam board is a very large crane fly which did not go to sleep without a fight. Seeing this was a bit disturbing, so I put it in another room. We captured several spiders to observe and spray painted a few webs gold so that we could see the intricate designs woven by the spiders.

For the past 4 weeks we have had a painted turtle that the boys named Shelly. They have never had a pet, so we have learned about pet care and turtles at the same time. She is the one critter that is starting to grow on me, although the plan is to return her to the pond from which she came.

Although we were done with this unit, no one bothered to tell the critters. Since this little green guy saw fit to make his way onto our patio I figured the least we could do was take a picture of him. Isn't he cute?

So, now lets see. We've caught toads, frogs, turtles, slugs, worms, spiders, various insects, lizards, birds (shells at least), and clams. I think we've had a well rounded animal kingdom experience. Are we more orderly for our observations? The jury is still out on that one. I'll have to ask J when he gets home.

The perfect way to end this unit was with a trip to the zoo. I'll share the pics from that trip in the next post.