O is for Owl Babies
~Mali is 4 years 10 months~
This is our last letter in our Alphabet Fun series! All of the links will now be on my sidebar and if you hover over a link, you can get an idea of what each post is about. Since this is our last letter, we kept it real simple. :-)
For our Alphabet Fun with the letter O, we read Owl Babies
The Owl Craft:
A simple craft made with paper plates painted brown, a beak and feet cut out of orange card stock and large googlie eyes!
The lap/scrap book:
I ended up assembling this whole lap/scrap page myself. Mali was interested in the owl poems and songs and reading the story mostly. So, I just read the mini books to him, talked about the story and sang the songs.
Now, I get to take all the crafts and photos from our early lessons and make scrapbook pages for them and compile them all into a preschool memory album for Malachi.
Preschool for Malachi has been a learning through play adventure full of hands on, natural learning. I wrote this when I first began, so will just quote myself to wrap up my thoughts on our journey.
I love natural learning. I love teaching when children don’t realize they are being taught. That is my goal and my passion in my homeschool. Learning to read through creative play is my vision for my preschool program that I am creating for my soon to be 4 year old son, Malachi, and his soon to be 2 year old sister, Eliana, who will play along and probably learn more than I can imagine.
I hope that I have made learning a “delight” for him. And I hope that our focus of creative play has given him a foundation for what’s to come!
At this point, I have no further preschool plans, and I am still working on a plan for Kindergarten. We actually finished up this lesson awhile ago, but I am just getting around to posting it. Since then, Malachi has been playing like a little boy. He has forts and bases set up for his army guys all over the play room, in the hall, and into the other bedrooms on a daily basis. I am amazed at how well he and Elli are playing together and for how long (hours!). Since we schooled all summer, this is a good break for him (and me too!). He turns 5 in a couple months so I am thinking we will begin our new lessons then.
Delightful Owl Links:
- Owl Babies Lesson Plans
- Counting Owls
- 5 Little Owls Counting Poem
- Owl Babies Nest
- Owl Babies Sounds
- Owl Babies Fact Book
- Nocturnal Animals
- Owl Poems and Songs
- What Do Owls Eat?
- Owl Babies Vocabulary
- Owl Template
- Owl Lacing Card
- Cover
- Owl Craft
U is for Underground
Since we are learning about earthworms, and earthworms live underground, I thought we should study about what else lived underground for the letter U. We also learned a little more about habitat and explored the microhabitat of life underground and under a stone.
- The wood louse (roly poly)
- Millipedes
- Centipedes
- Earthworms
- Ants
- Jumping Bristle Tail
- Stone Fly (under stones in rivers)
- Nature Coloring Book
- Lapbook Lessons Alphabet Lapbook ~ Who Lives Underground?
E is for Earl the Earthworm
For our alphabet fun with the letter E, Mali and I read Earl The Earthworm Digs for His Life
From Green Sugar Press,
“In this 32-page book geared toward children aged five to nine, Earl takes us deep into his world. From buzzing bees, working ants, tall prairie grass and an amazing tree, Earl explores his surroundings in a quest to answer the question: What is it I do? After near total exhaustion, rain starts to fall and Earl begins to dig. Why does he dig? Nobody knows for sure, but if you ask Earl, he’ll tell you his gut told him to.”
We learned some neat facts about earthworms and then we made an earthworm composting bin.
Earthworm Composting
Introducing Earl to his new home
Earthworm Food
E is for Earthworm
Earthworm Experiment:
“The worms digged through the dirt and went under the black paper. Worms like dark.”
Earthworm Enemies:
Digging for potatoes led to finding our stash of earthworms this fall. Whenever we went fishing, we put the extra worms in the garden boxes.
Earthworm Tunneling
Earthworm Movement
We also learned some earthworm vocabulary, such as: burrow, cocoon, castings, bristle, saddle, and setae.
Earthworm castings make rich organic composting material that is ideal for gardening and we always have plenty of earthworm food around here. We are looking forward to seeing if our worms reproduce and how long it takes to make compost.
UPDATE! Read about our earthworm babies here!
Up Next: U is for Underground
Delightful Earthworm Links:
Nature Explorers ~ Squirrels
~Mali is 4.8 years and Elli is 2.9 years old~
If you give a mom two weeks to do a lesson on squirrels, she will have way too much fun with it! Here is what I have been doing to explore nature with my young children.
We have lots of these little furry creatures living in our neighborhood.
First, we read a cute squirrel book:
This was a fun, predictable book, that Elli was able to read with me after reading it together several times. The leaves are falling and the air is getting cold, so squirrel is busy getting ready for winter. He couldn’t stop to play, because he was so busy!
We learned a lot about squirrels in the book, Nature for the Very Young: A Handbook of Indoor and Outdoor Activities
One of the things we learned is that squirrels like to nibble on pinecones, so we took a walk to find pinecones and did a Tot School activity with them.
Collecting pinecones.
Elli transferred pine cones with tongs into an egg carton.
She is giggling because “something” doesn’t belong. Can you tell what? She also claimed a pine cone as her “cute little baby.” It cracked me up so much that I had to share this short video!
I also had her count them when she was done. She counted to 13 and then skipped to 18.
Squirrels like to eat acorns so for an indoor activity, we made acorn cookies from a great peanut butter cookie recipe that can be rolled out:
Ingredients:
- 1 c. butter
- 2 1/2 c. packed brown sugar
- 1 1/2 c. peanut butter
- 2 eggs
- 1/4 c. milk
- 2 T vanilla
- 3 1/2 c. flour
- 1 1/2 t. baking soda
- 1 1/2 t. salt
Cream butter, sugar and peanut butter until smooth. Then add egg, milk and vanilla. Combine flour, baking soda and salt and stir into mixture until well blended. {Note, I forgot the eggs and the cookies came out great}
While the dough is still soft, place a ball of dough between two sheets of wax paper and roll into a sheet. Place on cookie sheet and refrigerate until firm. Then cut cookies into desired shape and bake as usual. (8-10 minutes at 375 degrees). This recipe is an adaptation from the Delicious Peanut Butter Cookie recipe. {Halve for smaller families}
We dipped the tops in melted chocolate. If they look good, it is because they were!
Peanut butter acorn cookies.
We went to the park to learn more about squirrels. We did an experiment to find out what squirrels will eat. We laid out different foods like nuts, fruit vegetables, etc. in a place where we could observe it to see which foods are eaten first.
Our squirrel buffet.
We included:
- Pine cone (we read that squirrels like to nibble on pinecones)
- Pine cone with peanut butter
- Peanuts
- Almonds
- Rolled oats
- Whole grain banana muffin
- Flax and sunflower toast w/ butter
- Peanut butter cookie
- Squash chips
- Apple
- Cheese
- Sunflower Seeds
We set the egg carton filled with food under a big tree in our city park.
My little Nature Explorers:
Observing the squirrels and recording what they learned.
Mali did not think the squirrels would like anything we brought. He thought they would only eat acorns. Elli thought they would like everything.
Our squirrels liked the:
- banana muffin
- pine cone with peanut butter
- peanut butter cookie
- toast
- peanuts
- almonds
- sunflower seeds
- cheese
They went after the home baked goods first! And apparently the squirrels at our park do not like fruits and veggies. I thought it was funny that one squirrel moved the apple out of the way.
We also thought it was funny that the squirrels quarreled over the food and attacked each other for it.
And they are pretty brave when they want food.
I got a comment about this video on You Tube that squirrels do eat people. From what I could find, squirrels are primarily vegetarians that eat nuts, fruits, fungi, lichens, buds, mushrooms, roots, pine cones, leaves, twigs and bark; but, if faced with hunger they have been known to eat bird eggs, snakes and insects. I do think squirrels carry disease and do bite, so while you can hand feed the squirrels at our park, I do not encourage this.
Afterwards, we had fun pretending to be a squirrel. We hopped, galloped, leaped and climbed like squirrels. We even tried walking on a movable balance bean pretending it was a branch swaying in the wind!
Squirrels have great balance!
Squirrels can climb really good!
The idea for this tree comes straight from the nature book mentioned above. I originally saw it and didn’t think I was ambitious enough, but Jen’s video (in her post here) on how to make it encouraged me. It turned out colorful and fun.
Dress Me Oak Tree
Elli had a little difficulty with the snaps, but still enjoyed dressing the oak tree with baby squirrels, acorns and leaves made out of felt.
Be sure to head over to Blissful Moments to see what she and others did this week to explore nature. Also, check out the next topic: habitats!
