Pick your pet

 The Out of the Cage Pet Mobile visited the Canastota Library this evening.

 The kids have a list of new pets they would like to have.

 Scratching the head of a leopard tortoise

 Big Mac, the leopard tortoise

 The walking stick bug

 This cool insect tickles

 

The softest animal in the world,  Chimichanga, a Grey Chinchilla

"Can we pick just one animal to take home?"

The catches of the day

Old MacDonald Had a Farm-activities

Today we had fun reenacting Old MacDonald Had a Farm with our farm animals.
I found these great printables at Kidsparkz. We made this a game by turning the cards over and as we sang "Old MacDonald" one of the kids would pick a card and then that is the animal sound we would sing.

We then put the card down on the "farm" and we found the matching toy animals and put these on the correct picture.

The kids all enjoyed this song-game. They wanted to play it over and over.

These cards also include baby animals to match to their mothers.
We laughed a lot as we read Cock A Doodle Moo!

Of course, we needed a craft to continue on our farm theme, so today we made paper plate cows.

We usually do all our crafting from "scratch", but this time, with so many farm crafts I want to make, I purchased this kit which contains everything we need to make three different animals--- and these were already cut out!!

I needed to help Kimmy with hers, she was a little under the weather today!

But, as Gracie made her cow, Kimmy pepped up and read Grace the directions.

I love how Mark made his cow's eyes.

Our "farm" wall is beginning to fill up!

You can find our first farm post here

and the second farm post here.

Author Fiesta-Jim Arnosky-Animal Tracks

It may not seem it, due to the lack of posts, but the Jim Arnosky Author Fiesta is still going strong around here.

One of the kids favorite books by Jim Arnosky has been Wild Tracks! This contains beautiful Arnosky animal illustrations along with life size illustrations of mostly North American animal tracks,tracks that can be found out and about right here in our neck of the woods.

After enjoying perusing this book for a few weeks, the time came to start some projects.

The first fun activity was to make plaster casts of our own "tracks". I used homemade playdough for the print and then

poured plaster of paris into the prints. I sent Becky on the mission of finding Plaster of Paris since this is NOT one of our normal craft materials. It was easily found in the craft section of Wal-Mart. Twenty-four hours later we had nice casts of some of the kids prints. Two came out perfect-one did not.

We then got out tracing paper to trace our favorite animal tracks out of the Wild Tracks book.
Gracie choose a moose. After tracing the print, she transferred it onto regular paper and then colored it in-concentrating on shading-just like Jim Arnosky does.
We then made tracks of Mark and Grace's feet. We did this in the bathroom, as they sat on the edge of the tub!
making our print
Grace and Mark's tracks.

Our wall display. (Yes, we are almost out of wall space at our home.)

Mark did not choose a North American mammal. He chose a African lion, because it is his favorite. Jim Arnosky included this in the book for size comparison to American cats.

Zoo Day

Today, Dad took us all to the zoo.

In the zoo gift shop we found this sign, which is now hung in the kitchen. I thought it described perfectly the house as we got ready to go to the zoo.

Kimmy hammed it up for the camera while we were there. She kept this pose until the camera was put away.

I'm not sure what this penguin thought of Mark, but I guess it liked him.

Of course, we have to have some of the kids pose as penguins. Very cute,

especially the little baby penguin.

Poor Luke had to push his own stroller. I hope his legs won't get too tired.

He walked all the way to the barn, and then had to milk the cow by himself so that he could have a drink.

Is there an age limit posted on this cow?

We have just finished learning about bears around the world, and we were very happy to get such a good look at the spectacled bear.

We have been learning so much, Grace is ready to get out there and move the world!

A Rabbit Trail

I commented to one of the older children recently that we have only been schooling for a few weeks and we had already headed off on a "rabbit trail." This child didn't understand what I meant so I explained and then realized that it would be more easily explained in a visual way.

So, here is what happened in our homeschool from the time we began our Blueberries for Sal
lapbook from Hands of a Child, up to today.(We never know what tomorrow will bring.)

We got started in the usual way, we purchased the book and project pack and started on our trail.

We learned a lot about Maine and blueberries. We studied the New England states, and the coast line and the ocean.
We then went on to the animals of the New England area, concentrating on bears. This caused us to learn about bears around the world, especially Kodiak bears and Polar bears. Two of our favorite animals, which of course live in Alaska.

We happened to see a television show, Into Alaska with Jeff Corwin, which is now one of our favorite shows and I have scheduled our DVR to record all the episodes. We loved the scenes about bears, in fact we loved everything about Alaska.


After discussing Alaska, I ordered all these books from our inter-library loan borrowing system.
These books made us very interested in all the animals of northern North America.


Because we have found we love all the animals of northern North America, I bought these very nice animals from Safari Ltd.


Of course these animals are so nice, we will need some from other parts of the world, maybe the animals of Antactica, because we could always compare the animals of the far north with animals from the far south........or we could learn animal folklore of the Inuit people.....or animal folklore of all native Americans......maybe this is way we don't always finish everything I plan to do in a school year----there are too many rabbits leaving trails around.