MFW 1st - Day 5

Our first Exploration Day! What fun we had.

We started with reviewing the science book pages from a couple of days ago. Then I had the boys search the book basket for books about moles and ants and other animals we might find close to the ground. We read one book about moles, one about ants and one about snails.

Then I said, "It's time to do our experiments." Pooh said, "Really?! We get to do experiments?!" (Can you tell that's his favorite part of school?) The first was to see if we could attract some ants to a piece of bread soaked in honey. It had rained last night, so there weren't many ants out at first. We found some place with signs of ant holes and left a piece of bread (about the size of a nickel or quarter). Later in the day, we found ants on the bread and could see many ants carrying away tiny pieces of bread in their mouths.

The next experiment was to make a worm habitat. First, we made are jar with the layers, and then went on a worm hunt. Well, that was a failure. We tried digging in 3 different places, no worms. But, in the process found a young grasshopper or cricket, so that was cool. I was hoping with the rain the worms could be found, but no such luck.

We came back in, and I had the boys do some pattern block pages. Pooh loved these. They were harder for Tigger, so I helped him out, but he was starting to get the hang of it pretty quickly. These are Pooh's first couple of attempts:

And here are Tigger's:

We looked at the first painting in the blue Come Look With Me book. That was a really interesting discussion. When I asked Tigger where he would want to be if he could be in the picture, he pointed at one of the houses. He said it would be warm in the house (the picture was a winter scene). Pooh said he would be one of the ice skaters.

Then I was hit with the inspiration to go over to Cherry Creek Reservoir for a nature walk. Turns out that a tree on the swim beach was struck with lightning in last night's storms, so that was cool to see the bark and part of the tree stripped off. It looked like the bark just exploded all over the place. And we saw real ant hills along the beach, too. We didn't stay long, but the boys had a good time running around and looking at stuff.

The boys really wanted worms for the worm habitat, so we went to Walmart and bought a tub of night crawlers from the sporting goods department. Pooh kept asking if they were "slimy" on the way home. When we got home we added about 4 worms to our jar and then ripped some leaves into tiny piece to top it off. Tigger didn't mind touching the worms, but Pooh refused to help with that part. (I didn't mind either.) Almost as soon as we added the worms, they started digging into the soil we put in the jar. I had some black cloth from some sewing experiment in the past, so I cut that up to put over the top and secured it with a rubber band. I suspect we'll be checking the condition of the worms daily. Here's a couple of views of our worms:

We're still working on A Bear Named Paddington at bedtime, and the boys are enjoying it.