A Garden Challenge

I was inspired to do an enrichment unit with the kids. This inspiration came after I read all about the Garden Challenge.  I have been thinking about doing something that would involve both children.  This is a little difficult as there is a vast world of difference between them.  Gardening is the perfect solution, enough interesting things for the big girl and well, dirt, outside, and probably some sort of crawly things for the little boy.

Our family has dabbled in gardening off an on over the years.  I decided to make a new fresh start with our old pea trellis.  We will make a small garden from scratch, drawing out the the plans to decide how big it needs to be to include what we want to plant.  I really want to include Zippy in every stage of the garden.

 

Planting - I want to plant three types of things
(1.) Seedlings that we propagated ourselves - probably peas and chives
(2.) Seeds directly into the ground - green onions
(3.) Plants we buy from the nursery - at least tomatoes, maybe a pumpkin and some herbs

Resources - The thing I really want the children (particularly Zippy) to get out of this experience is to understand where food comes from, and how the cultivation of food is important in many different places. To expand on the garden experience we will be reading several books - some for Zippy some for the Little Dude, some for both.

Crickets

We are starting a new section in Science.  This year we are working on Life Science and decided to use Creepy Crawlies and the Scientific Method by Sally Stenhouse Kneidel as our guide.

Zippy did not want to do science, at all.  She whined and carried on about how boring, how hard, how much she just didn't want to do it.  This persuaded me that we had to do something really cool and fun. What is more fun than live critters?  This book is all about getting critters from nature to study.  Nature is cheap, that appealed to my frugality. One problem right now though, nature is frozen.  So looking through the book I decided that we could buy either earthworms or crickets. I let Zippy decide, and she chose crickets.

Before we bought the crickets I went over the scientific method with Zippy, which is definitely part of this book.  There was groaning, there were eye rolls, but, in the end she wrote it down.  All the complaining stopped dead it its tracks, though, when the crickets came home.  The husband is now the designated critter controller. We are going to do the science in the evening, because he is just better with handling science-y stuff than I am.

We made our own terrarium from a plastic storage bin with holes drilled in the top and play sand with a total cost at less than $5.00.    The first part of the method is observation.  Zippy and the husband enjoy watching to see what they do.  She is writing down her observations and questions.
 

Next week we will start doing the experiments in the book.  My plan is to have cricket science for about 4 weeks, then I hope it will be warm enough to release them into the wild of the backyard.

Good Television

CBS’ Amazing Race is a great show: entertaining and educational. When I was teaching in the public schools I did Oshesky’s Amazing Trivia challenge, where I would pose a trivia question based on the geographic location of that week’s show. Now that we are homeschooling I couldn’t give up this great learning opportunity.

Here is the plan

For each destination:

• Find the country on a world map or in an atlas, we are plotting out the course on a world map.
• Fill out the worksheet (find the free printable worksheet here) 
• Country Name
• Capital of the Country
• Cities traveled through in the race
• 3 facts gleaned from the show i.e. kangaroo is the national symbol of Australia

There are also many opportunities, viewing The Amazing Race, to discuss character and virtue. 

• Teamwork
• Honesty
• Respect