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Bird Journal

Mar 9
Nature Study

Just wanted to share Satori’s new bird journal which we’ll be using as we read The Burgess Bird Book for Children.  You may notice below that she re-did some of her words and drawings, I put on a white sticker so she could redo them (just in case you’re wondering why 3 parts look strange). The below binder will house information about the birds we’re learning in the book.  We should actually make a new cover page.

Each chapter I’m printing out several bird photos of the bird we’re studying.

Then if we find a bird coloring page we’ll do that first while taking care to notice that bird’s particular markings. I’m taking one  of your suggestions and also printing off a fact list, map, and other helpful stuff. Even if she can’t read it all this year, one day she’ll look back and read it all with pride. :)

Here is Satori’s very first drawing, it is Jenny the House Wren.


This is Bully the House Sparrow. I blurted out that it looked more like a turkey, so she didn’t want it in her book. I gave her a quick bird anatomy/drawing lesson and she wanted to try again.

Here’s her second attempt of which she is more proud. She traced a drawing I had printed out, then used black marker to outline it. Finally, colored it in with her Lyra Ferby pencils.

I thought it would be cool if both Satori and I could draw realistic looking birds, so we’re doing a quick study of simple bird anatomy. I printed off this “Parts of a Bird” PDF page several times, and we’ll refer to it several times until the parts of a bird become second nature. Hopefully being familiar with the parts of a bird will help both of us draw future birds.

Here’s a interactive Bird Anatomy page that deserves a look! After  you play with that page, surf around for more fun stuff.

I also started printing off bird photos. These are all 4″x4″ and then laminated. On the bag are stickers with some facts about the bird.

Finally, another great idea I got from you readers is a bird tree to post these birds on! I’m still thinking about how to do this. Of course once it’s up we’ll share the pictures!

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A Burgess Bird Book Companion

Mar 8
Nature Study

The following is a sneak peek at a document I’ve been working on this past weekend.

A Burgess Bird Book Companion

I’ve put together a list of resources to complement this fantastic book. This companion document is not affiliated with the Burgess Bird Book, it is simply a handy reference to list related links. I’ve linked to the top bird identification sites and to free coloring pages. I couldn’t resist looking up the Audubon plush birds with sound calls, we have a few in our collection.

The Burgess Bird Book For Children by Thornton W. Burgess – This book is in the public domain and I’ve provided links to read the entire story free online, which you can print out or read on-screen. If you want a physical copy of the book, the link above will take you to a newly illustrated, full-color version. There is also a Kindle version, which has B&W illustrations.

Each chapter describes a story about Peter Rabbit and the birds that live around him. The chapter covers two birds on average. Children will learn their physical appearance, characteristics, eating and nesting habits, behavior, songs, and calls.

Chapter List

  1. Jenny Wren Arrives
  2. The Old Orchard Bully
  3. Jenny Has a Good Word for Some Sparrows
  4. Chippy, Sweetvoice, and Dotty
  5. Peter Learns Something He Hadn’t Guessed
  6. An Old Friend in a New Home
  7. The Watchman of the Old Orchard
  8. Old Clothes and Old Houses
  9. Longbill and Teeter
  10. Redwing and Yellow Wing
  11. Drummers and Carpenters
  12. Some Unlike Relatives
  13. More of the Blackbird Family
  14. Bob White and Carol the Meadow Lark
  15. A Swallow and One Who Isn’t
  16. A Robber in the Old Orchard
  17. More Robbers
  18. Some Homes in the Green Forest
  19. A Maker of Thunder and a Friend in Black
  20. A Fisherman Robbed
  21. A Fishing Party
  22. Some Feathered Diggers
  23. Some Big Mouths
  24. The Warblers Arrive
  25. Three Cousins Quite Unlike
  26. Peter Gets a Lame Neck
  27. A New Friend and an Old One
  28. Peter Sees Rosebreast and Finds Redcoat
  29. The Constant Singers
  30. Jenny Wren’s Cousins
  31. Voices of the Dusk
  32. Peter Saves a Friend and Learns Something
  33. A Royal Dresser and a Late Nester
  34. Mourner the Dove and Cuckoo
  35. A Butcher and a Hummer
  36. A Stranger and a Dandy
  37. Farewells and Welcomes
  38. Honker and Dippy Arrive
  39. Peter Discovers Two Old Friends
  40. Some Merry Seed-eaters
  41. More Friends Come with the Snow
  42. Peter Learns Something About Spooky
  43. Queer Feet and a Queerer Bill
  44. More Folks in Bed
  45. Peter Sees Two Terrible Feathered Hunters

1. Jenny Wren Arrives

“Introducing the House Wren”

2. The Old Orchard Bully

“The English or House Sparrow”

3. Jenny Has a Good Word for Some Sparrows

“The Song, White-throated and Fox Sparrows”

4. Chippy, Sweetvoice, and Dotty

“The Chipping, Vesper, and Tree Sparrows”

5. Peter Learns Something He Hadn’t Guessed

“The Bluebird and a Robin”

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6. An Old Friend in a New Home

“The Phoebe and the Least Flycatcher”

7. The Watchman of the Old Orchard

“The Kingbird and the Great Crested Flycatcher”

8. Old Clothes and Old Houses

“The Wood Pewee and Some Nesting Places”

9. Longbill and Teeter

“The Woodcock and the Spotted Sandpiper”

10. Redwing and Yellow Wing

“The Red-winged Blackbird and the Golden-winged Flicker”

11. Drummers and Carpenters

“The Downy, Hairy, and Red-Headed Woodpeckers”

12. Some Unlike Relatives

“The Cowbird and the Baltimore Oriole”

13. More of the Blackbird Family

“The Orchard Oriole and the Bobolink”

14. Bob White and Carol the Meadow Lark

“The So-called Quail and the Meadow Lark”

15. A Swallow and One Who Isn’t

“The Tree Swallow and the Chimney Swift”

16. A Robber in the Old Orchard

“The Purple Martin and the Barn Swallow”

17. More Robbers

“The Crow and the Blue Jay”

18. Some Homes in the Green Forest

“The Crow, the Oven Bird, and the Redtailed Hawk”

19. A Maker of Thunder and a Friend in Black

“The Ruffed Grouse and the Crow Blackbird”

20. A Fisherman Robbed

“The Osprey and the Bald-headed Eagle”

21. A Fishing Party

“The Great Blue Heron and the Kingfisher”

22. Some Feathered Diggers

“The Bank Swallow, the Kingfisher, and the Sparrow Hawk”

23. Some Big Mouths

“The Nighthawk, the Whip-poor-will and Chuck-will’s-widow”

24. The Warblers Arrive

“The Redstart and the Yellow Warbler”

25. Three Cousins Quite Unlike

“The Black and White Warbler, the Maryland Yellow-Throat and the Yellow-Breasted Chat”

26. Peter Gets a Lame Neck

“The Parula, Myrtle and Magnolia Warblers”

27. A New Friend and an Old One

“The Cardinal and the Catbird”

28. Peter Sees Rosebreast and Finds Redcoat

“The Rose-breasted Grosbeak and the Scarlet Tanager”

29. The Constant Singers

“The Red-Eyed, Warbling, and Yellow-throated Vireos”

30. Jenny Wren’s Cousins

“The Brown Thrasher and the Mockingbird”
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31. Voices of the Dusk

“The Wood, Hermit and Wilson’s Thrushes”
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32. Peter Saves a Friend and Learns Something

“The Towhee and the Indigo Bunting”
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33. A Royal Dresser and a Late Nester

“The Purple Linnet and the Goldfinch”
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34. Mourner the Dove and Cuckoo

“The Mourning Dove and the Yellow-billed Cuckoo”
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35. A Butcher and a Hummer

“The Shrike and the Ruby-throated Hummingbird”
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36. A Stranger and a Dandy

“The English Starling and the Cedar Waxwing”
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37. Farewells and Welcomes

“The Chickadee”
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38. Honker and Dippy Arrive

“The Canada Goose and the Loon”
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39. Peter Discovers Two Old Friends

“The White-breasted Nuthatch and the Brown Creeper”
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40. Some Merry Seed-eaters

“The Tree Sparrow and the Junco”
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41. More Friends Come with the Snow

“The Snow Bunting and the Horned Lark”
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42. Peter Learns Something About Spooky

“The Screech Owl”

43. Queer Feet and a Queerer Bill

“The Ruffed Grouse and the Crossbills”"
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44. More Folks in Bed

“The Pine Grosbeak and the Redpoll”
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45. Peter Sees Two Terrible Feathered Hunters

“The Goshawk and the Great Horned Owl”
Product Details
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Crayon Physics – download for as little as a penny

Jan 10
Science

Imagine drawing a picture with a crayon and having the objects follow the laws of physics. Imagine no more, download Crayon Physics now! Watch their way cool video to get hooked… For their 1st birthday sale, you can pay what you want. Pay as little as 1 cent or all the way up to the full price of $19.95 (which I consider a bargain anyway). I donated a few bucks immediately, got the download link and started playing away!

Crayon Physics Deluxe from Petri Purho on Vimeo.

Here’s their first game puzzle. It tells you to draw a box. Here I am drawing it (with my mouse). It looks just like an old folded-up piece of paper and crayon drawings. :)

 

As soon as you’re done drawing, the laws of physics take over! Gravity makes the box fall, which bumps the ball to your star.

There are over 70 puzzles to solve, or you can go in Level Editor mode.

Here’s a more advanced video:

Crayon Physics – Castle Challenge from Highway6 on Vimeo.

Download it today, the birthday sale only lasts a few more days and ends January 15, 2010.

Now, off to install this on our family computer, which has a huge touch-screen monitor!

Another cool physics computer game we have (but haven’t really played yet) is World of Goo, coincidentally, first started the “Pay what you want” promotion on their birthday. I will have Satori play that and then come back to review it (and say whether a 5 year old girl can figure out the puzzles).

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Snap Circuits Jr. Review – it’s a Snap!

Jan 9
Other Products, Science

Family night tonight! On the agenda – Tacos for dinner, reading a few science books aloud, then doing a fun science activity, and finally family games! This post covers the “fun science activity”.

To tie in with this week’s science lesson which introduced electricity, we pulled out Snap Circuits Jr. With this kit and a pair of AA batteries, you can build over 100 projects (101 to be exact). You may notice by the picture that this was designed for ages 8 to 108, but don’t let that stop you if your child is a few years younger. :) In our case, we know our 5 year old girl would benefit from this cool learning kit with the assistance of Mom and Dad. She understands the basics of electricity, that it is produced in power plants, travels to our homes via wires, and through switches, we complete the circuit for the flow of electricity to give energy to power appliances and such.

Be sure to read the instructions first, so you don’t inadvertently create a “short circuit” and damage your kit! I handed this project over to Daddy. The instructions though, are above her reading level, so Daddy would read and call out the little items needed – L1, #2 snap wire, etc… Here Satori is impatiently waiting, I overhead her grumbling a flippant comment.

Our first project was “Electric Light & Switch”. This consisted of 4 main items – power source (battery holder), lamp socket, slide switch and a few blue snap wires to connect. Once it’s complete, and the switch is turned on, the light goes on! It also finally piqued her curiosity.

The instruction manual tells you in what order and where on the grid to snap each item, so Satori was soon snapping away. Satori got a kick out of the next one, which converts the electricity to mechanical power and powers a little fan! We did one more – Sound Activated Switch. Snap Away Satori!

This one is powered by sound, so Satori would clap to play the song!

We only did these 3 activities tonight, and the next few lessons we’ll have Satori try to figure them out herself by looking at the pictures (with adult guidance of course). We’ll be working on all 101 over the next few years, and eventually upgrade to more advanced kits!

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Energy

Jan 6
Science

One of the subjects that got passed over too much last fall was Science. I think that is because I want to make it so relevant and fun to learn that I procrastinate on going to the library to pick up books, to plan out interactive lessons, and so on. But this spring I’m giving science a priority! I know I could just choose a simpler science curriculum, but I really like Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding and think it will give Satori those basic building blocks of science she needs to understand the world.

Today we learned about energy, and the four types of energy – electrical, movement, light, and heat energy. Although I loved science in school, all the way up to college, before today I wouldn’t have been able to name these 4 types. I guess I learned so long ago I forgot so much. Did I mention that I love learning alongside Satori?

I whipped out these cards in a few minutes, using 3×5 index cards and markers.

Satori sat down and together we discussed all the action cards.

After we matched up all the action cards to their energy source cards, we walked around the basement and examined other objects using energy. Her solar-powered calculator uses light energy to work, as plants use light energy from the sun to grow. Stoves and ovens produce heat energy to cook our food and boil our water. We had fun demonstrating movement energy ourselves! From our read-along books, Satori already knew that electricity comes from a power plant of some sort and travels by wires to our house. So she knew how electrical plugs worked, and how appliances and other things have cords that plug into the wall to use the electrical current. Here’s an item that just sits right on our plug.

We hunted down our power box and had fun explaining how this controlled the flow of electricity to sections of the house. I shut down the power to the main basement room, and the light switch no longer worked.

There’s a handy “Notes to teacher’s” section in the chapter to explain things to the grown-ups in more technical descriptions of physics. I love reading these and Nebel’s forums to cover any complicated questions that Satori might ask, that go beyond the lessons.

Here’s an example of stored electrical energy. We found batteries in several items. Fresh batteries will release the electrical energy slowly. Once it’s depleted, the toy or flashlight won’t work.

We read our books on energy and electricity over the past month, but I do mean to get a few more from the library to go over this topic a bit more. We need to cover the storage and release of energy, and energy changes from one form to another. This weekend, we’ll wait for Daddy to experiment with a new Christmas toy that demonstrates energy, more on that this weekend!

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David gets let loose in the Basement

Dec 13
Science

I don’t know what got into my husband this weekend! Despite a cold, he had some creative ideas for Satori. First, he wanted to show the distance between the sun and all the planets, and he used our floor to demonstrate. Our floor is the perfect space background, it’s black with millions of specks! Using chalk it turns into the biggest chalkboard. On one end of the room he drew our Sun, and then mapped out all the planets in accurate scale. Mercury through Mars were all close together, with Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune spread out across the middle of the long room. And Pluto was way on the other side of the room!

30 centimeters = 1 AU (Astronomical Unit)

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He also drew the relative sizes of the Sun verses all the planets. And finally, he took our National Geographic (from the latest issue) and mapped out how far to the planet Gilese in our Milky Way galaxy, which is 20 light years away. On that scale, this time Pluto was less than a centimeter away from the sun, and Gilese on the other side of the room! It’s so informative to view distances mapped out like this! Satori now can’t wait until we unpack our telescope, but I think we’ll wait until summer of 2010, it’s too cold and snowy right now.

He and Satori love to do that kind of stuff. Earlier this summer they measured dinosaurs. :)

You might notice the basement got a bit messy today! David then designed an obstacle course for Satori to run through. Jumping from rubber mat to rubber mat, crawling through tunnels, sliding up and down mountains, bouncing on my Bosu fitness balls. We cleaned most of it up, but you can still see some of the course. Yay for David this weekend!

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Owl Puke revisited

Dec 9
Owl Moon, Science

I promised to go over our Owl Puke book and activity over a month ago, and here it is! We finally cracked open our  Owl Puke project today and were very impressed. The book itself is super informative, and we learned so many interesting facts about owls.  They mate for life. They can read the bottom of an eye chart from one mile away. They can hear a mouse under a foot of snow and dive down to get it. This is one of the coolest reasons I love to homeschool, I get to learn new things too!

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Before we got down to the gross-out activity, we dug out Satori’s Snowy Owl, practiced moving its head 270 degrees to look around both back shoulders in one move. Hung out on OwlPages.com and checked out Owl Calls and Photos. Finally we prepared for the event. The book kit contains this yellow sorting tray and the sterilized owl pellet. All you really need is a clean space to work and a toothpick.

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Satori was very excited to “dig in”. She kept calling the skeleton a fossil, and I kept having to correct her. She said she was a real archaeologist now! I didn’t have the heart to correct her that time. Here she is with her kids rubber gloves that were too big, but she wanted to wear them anyway. In the photo below you can see part of the skull of the owl’s victim.

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She separated the bones from what looked like fur and put them in the container.

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The Owl Puke book really helps you figure out what all the bones are, and it was no problem putting them in the right spots! Neither Satori nor I had the patience to sort out all the tiny vertebrae though. We also thought we had two sets of legs, as we had 4 hips and 4 lower legs. The book also helped us narrow down which animal we had. In our case, we had either a small rat (or maybe a big mouse with large protruding teeth).

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Also with the book’s help, we laid out our skeleton. Not a perfect job, but good enough for us and Satori’s dwindling attention span by this point! :) All in all, such a fun learning activity…

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We concluded the owl puke activity by watching about 20 minutes of YouTube on owls!

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Hot Air Balloon project

Dec 8
Crafts, Science

We started making this Hot Air Balloon probably two months ago back when we studied Air for science. This drove the point home that everything, including air and helium balloons that rise – all weigh something. Helium and hot air are gases that simply weigh less than normal air, so they rise.

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To make this, blow up a balloon. Then, paste small squares of white paper to it, layering it with a few layers. Wait for it to dry. You do not have to wait two months like we did. ;) After dry, cut out the bottom of the balloon and take the balloon out. It will retain its shape.

Then paint away!

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Don’t tell Daddy, but Mama put yet another hole in the wall, this time a ceiling hook. He hates it when I put up holes in the walls, but sometimes it is worth it! :) The above photo is my perspective looking down on Satori painting while I was trying to get the hole in the ceiling. Once she was done, we attached a little basket I got from a craft store. You can also use an empty matchbox or make your own.

Then, the finished Hot Air Balloon, floating from our ceiling! The girl is almost falling out, Grandpa, pull her back!

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Now, we have to cuddle up, the locals tell me it is supposed to reach negative 34 degrees tonight!

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Owl Puke

Oct 29
Owl Moon, Science

Since we are reading Poppy (a book about a mean ole owl) and the fact that Satori started to open her owl pellets, I’ve decided to start our rowing of Owl Moon.

owl-moon

We shall learn about owls, moon phases, bird predators, and more.

The most exciting thing is probably our Owl Puke we examine. Owl Puke has a more agreeable name of owl pellets, which consists of a fuzzy mass of bones, hair, feathers, teeth and exoskeletons upchucked about 20 hours after a bird of prey eats. It doesn’t have to be an owl. There is actually a book I’ve ordered that contains a sterlized owl pellet, tray and chart. Once we get back from our London trip, we will dissect two more owl pellets, this time with gloves and tweezers.

Like I said, Satori opened one up already. Our cats went crazy over this new toy, before I realized they had caught on to what it was. You can see a skull and bones here, and probably feathers and/or fur. Next to it is our current read-aloud Poppy, which right in the beginning features one of the characters as an unfortunate owl pellet.

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Speaking of birds of prey, Satori got very excited today when she saw a huge bird! She had me come running with my camera. It looks like a hawk.

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Kite Runners

Sep 20
Science

To emphasize our science topic this week of “Air”, we were thrilled to have a windy day, perfect for kite flying! You gotta love it when you can combine science with physical activity and fun!

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We certainly got a lot of running in today, as it wasn’t consistent windy, rather gusts of occasional winds, so often we had to provide our own power by running. Of course our family had to have a flying pteradactyl!

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David trying to fly the other kite.

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Air is fun!

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Earlier today, at home, we performed science experiments that show the two points I wanted to demonstrate:

  1. Air takes up space.
  2. Air has weight.

Dr. Nebel’s book shows you how to setup these easy experiments that successfully drive the point home, and even my husband and I learned some things today!

Air takes up space

Air takes up space

Here mom is blowing in the water, pushing the air into the water, which bubbles back up to the surface. Kashi the cat had fun observing the air. :)

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I love experiments!

- I overheard Satori saying this to herself today…

Here’s our balloon experiment which showed us that air does indeed weigh something.

Air has weight

Air has weight

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