Habitats

(just a warning...this isn't the most exciting post. I'm mainly just posting it for me so I have a written down account of what we did in school.)

A few weeks ago (yes, I'm behind on blogging). My kids were studying habitats in science. I had Jordan and Mya made a habitat out of a shoe box.

Jordan made a "Desert" habitat. (I wasn't so sure about rhinos living in a desert but I did look it up and there are some species of rhino that can live in some deserts so I agreed to let him add the rhino to his habitat. He was BOUND and DETERMIND to have a rhino in his desert!)


Mya made an Ocean Habitat:

Paleontologists in the Making???

Jordan has been studying about fossils in his science book this week. The project we did to go along with this was called "Bag of Bones". (Each child was to be handed a "bag of bones" which was simply all different types of pasta. We didn't do the bags since we were out of baggies at the time) The object was to connect them together to make the shape of a dinosaur.

I decided to include all four kids in this project. Here is what we did:

I put lots of pasta in the middle of the table for the kids to grab as they needed. (we had macaroni, penne, lasagna noodles, and spaghetti noodles--you could use ANY type of dry pasta, I used only what I had in the pantry.)

I gave each child a piece of construction paper (we are out of construction paper so I had to dig in my scrapbook paper stash--eek!)

I was going to give the kids glue to glue the pasta to the paper BUT then I had a vision of what it would look like...a massive amount of glue puddled on their paper (especially for the little ones). SO I decided to make "paste" with only flour and water! Totally edible if they did get it in their mouth (which they did--the little ones anyway) and it didn't matter how much they used! It actually "glued" the pasta to the paper VERY WELL! I had them use paint brushes to get put the glue on the paper and pasta. Those worked really well.

My older kids decided to get even MORE creative and asked for a little bit of dry flour so they could "dust" it on their finished project so it looked they just dug up the bones and there was still dirt on them. Creative!

Overall..this project was a success. MESSY...yes, but they enjoyed it, it kept them busy and it tied into a lesson.

(oh and may I add that I forgot to put the flour up in the pantry and while I was cleaning up I ran to the bathroom--just for a second. When I came back, Gracie had dumped FLOUR all over my camera that was sitting on the counter!!!!! AHHHH....luckily no harm was done to my camera but talk about a scare! wow!)

Here are some pictures: (not sure why both my boys are shirtless..they are so funny...even in the middle of winter they are constantly taking their shirts off. I don't know how they aren't chilly!)