Posted by Cindy on November 30, 2009
November proved to be a great time of the year for a rock study! We learned about rocks and minerals, life under rocks and even had great luck finding fossils in rocks.
What are fossils? They’re remains of plant or animal life from the past. As the song from Buddy Davis from Answers in Genesis goes…”billions of dead things buried in rock layers, laid down by water, all over the earth.” Finding fossils is like a treasure hunt! Here in Central KY, we don’t have to go far to find wonderful fossil examples…
The shells are easy to see, but can you find the coral in the bottom right corner?
This picture is harder to see, but there are bone-like fossils in the middle and near the bottom.
The coral is easy to see in the middle of this picture!
I’d love to see pictures of fossils you find in rocks!
Below are some of the resources we used this month. December will be focusing on Animal Signs. I may or may not put up resources in the sidebar since December is such a busy month. If not, I’ll be sure to add Conifer resources in January!
Posted by Cindy on February 13, 2009
Around our house – a slug! Can you see him near the middle on the left? He’s pretty well camouflaged.
We weren’t even doing nature study. We were learning about measuring the volume of an irregular shape in water when I sent the kids outside to find a few rocks for measuring. This little critter was happily living underneath one of the rocks (until we got hold of him!) He’s near the top of the rock in the picture below.
If the rain held off, we were going down to the creek for a nature walk later in the day, but I decided to seize this moment instead. My children were so excited about their find in the middle of winter. (Besides, the rain was probably not going to hold off.)
We got online to decide whether we were looking at a slug, or a snail making its way to a bigger shell. On just a plain piece of paper, they drew the slug, noted its behaviors and added info we learned from the internet. Voila! A great spontaneous learning lesson. A great notebooking page for the nature journal. And a lesson that found all sorts of enthusiasm from my children because it was something driven by their interests.
What fun nature find have you made this winter? Or, how do you incorporate spontaneous learning into your homeschool?
