Cozy and Warm

Hello!  Whew, another whirlwind of a day here at homeschool. Our second to last class! Our morning game was fishy fishy cross my ocean. Always a favorite! Today’s greeting was a choice between a pound (touching fists), a high five, or a silly animal, like a snail or turkey. (See photo!)

Then we reviewed what our passwords have been all session. Impressively, kids remembered difficult words like curcubitaceae, and long-ago words like harvest (way back in September). Parents, prepare to learn all about the passwords next time at our last class! 

Kids then shared home projects. They had been doing lots of thinking in the last week about how they stay warm in the winter (everything from “migrating” to California to generating heat by eating pumpkin seeds!).

We read the morning message and introduced the theme of the day: Cozy and Warm. The password is insulation. We discussed what insulation is and demonstrated by doing an experiment. Kids picked what material they wanted to insulate with and each pair was given a jar to insulate. Then we took the temperature of boiled water – about 188° - and poured it into the jars. We insulated our jars the best we could, and left one without insulation to be our control. Then, since the weather was so warm outside, we decided to put the jars in the freezer to test how well we insulated the jars. We recorded all our information on our insulation sheets.

Then everyone got a turn to try on the "blubber gloves" and put their hands in ice water. On one hand was just a plastic baggie. On the other was a "glove" of plastic baggies with Crisco (pretend animal fat) inside. Which one was better insulated?

After a quick snack, we went outside for our adventure. We marched to Larch Hill, where we were given a challenge: build the most insulated shelter you can using materials from the forest. Everyone built something really different and did a great job. One was expertly camouflaged. One had fun details like a slide for fairies. And one was big enough to fit several homeschoolers! 

When we were done with our challenge we headed back to the Hitchcock Center by way of the farm. We were looking for a red-tailed hawk that we had startled from her roost, but we couldn’t find her again. (I think it was a female because she was so big!) We played in the cattails and made sure the praying mantis egg case was still there, and then we had to be on our way.

We ate lunch and then checked our jars in the freezer. The results were interesting! Some you could tell the difference in temperature just by touching. Some had leaked, with water frozen to the material. Everyone had a chance to record the temperature of their jars, and to compare their results with their prediction. See our results in the photo.

Next, some of us worked on journals while others did our craft for the day: an insulating snake for drafty doorways. We filled tubes of material with sand, beans and rice and then hot glued eyes and tongues on. They came out awesome! A huge thank you to Carole and Betsy for helping out.

We are looking forward to seeing you all at 1:30 next time for a special homeschool museum-style display of all we’ve been working on this session. See you there!

Hide and Sleep

What a perfect day to talk about strategies for coping with winter. We had a wonderful time in homeschool today, studying the different ways animals cope with the cold. We began by playing “Frost and Sun,” a tag game in which children are tagged by the one person who is the frost and “melted” by the sun person. Kids loved it! 

We came inside and began morning circle by doing the butterfly greeting. In this greeting children link thumbs and flap their “wings” and say good morning. Then a few kids shared their lists of seeds that are important in their lives. The seeds of cucumbers, tomatoes, pumpkins and sunflowers are important to many of us in homeschool!

Then we read the schedule for the day and the morning message. Today’s theme is “Hide and Sleep” and the password is dormant. We discussed the difference between animals that are dormant in the winter (mostly sleep but wake up occasionally to eat) and animals that are true hibernators (animals whose body temperature drops and breathing and heart rate decrease, and who do not wake up at all until spring). But those aren’t the only winter strategies! To help us sort out all the choices animals have in winter, we learned the six “-ate” words and talked about the animals that do each one. These words are tricky but kids really made connections with them, recognizing why each animals used these strategies. We soon realized that animals can do more than one! 

  
Then we had a special visitor, Laurel Carpenter, a wildlife biologist from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. She showed us several pelts that New England mammals use for insulation during our cold winters: beaver, river otter, bobcat, and coyote. Kids got to pat the furs and feel the different kinds of fur: the rough fur on top and the soft fur underneath.

Then we did an investigation of one reason animals hibernate: she passed around a container of fresh pineapple for us all to smell. It smelled strongly! Then she passed around pieces of pineapple frozen in ice cubes. We almost couldn’t smell it! That’s how it is for animals in winter when they find food. It is much harder to find food when it is frozen because it doesn’t smell very much. We talked about the other reasons that animals might not hibernate. Some animals are plant, insect or seed eaters and these food sources die or become covered with snow in winter. Other animals don’t have thick fur coats to keep them warm. With cold temperatures and short amounts of daylight in which to forage, the best choice for some animals is hibernation.

 


Next we went outside and pretended we were woodchucks. Each child had to go make a den, which was symbolized by a paper plate. Then they had 15 seconds to collect as many milk caps as possible, which represented food, bringing them to their den. Kids did very well in the first round, but the second round was harder. There was much less food. Not everyone “survived”. In the third round, we introduced a coyote, who made it that much harder for woodchucks to collect food.  That was the hardest of all!

After our game we had snack and went back out again for our outdoor adventure. We started with a scavenger hunt, looking for signs of animals getting ready for winter. Kids found black walnuts, a red squirrel, and a woodchuck hole. At the base of a tree was a great shelter for an animal under the roots. We made our way through the woods to the farm. After thoroughly searching the hibernaculum, we went to the cattails, which were poofy with seeds! We had a great time watching them fly around and sticking to people’s clothes.

 

 

 

When we came back we ate lunch and said good-bye to Laurel. After we ate, kids colored animal bingo sheets. Then we played winter animal bingo! I gave clues about what the animal did in winter and the kids had to guess which animal I was talking about. It was a blast!

At journal time there was a lot to do! We glued in our bingo cards, scavenger hunts and a chart saying which animals did what in the wintertime. Then we played animal charades! Using our “-ate” words, kids acted out some actions of animals in winter. Kids were wonderful actors! Then we had closing circle and it was time to say goodbye. Thanks for a wonderful day everyone!