Sunday, November 29, 2020

Reptiles and birds

 Soooo sad. We are stopping science club at least until the new year because of the stinker COVID19. I really hope we will be able to commence again soon, but I am honestly not very hopeful. Not until we can start going outside again will this spike go down (I HOPE I'm wrong.)

I wish we could at least do our last club about animal classes (mammals) but we just couldn't.

We had a lesson on reptiles. We didn't have any dissection for reptiles, but I had students bring in REAL LIVE reptiles for show and tell. That was super fun, and the older class brought a turtle that kept pooping all over!

I think this is the turtle from the younger class, he's 35 years old!

We had fun little activities such as putting snake "tongues" on our noses so we could "smell," and putting balloon lizard "tales" on ourselves that we tried to take off....yeah it was a crazy game I made up, but I think they loved it.


I also knew I wanted those sticky hand flinger things to pretend to be lizards' tongues, but they weren't at the dollar store. I knew were I had seen them in town. I took a ton of quarters and went to the dentist's office and asked if I could buy their prizes! I remembered they had the sticky hands as a prize in a gum-ball machine. I felt really awkward, but I got my sticky hands!

Then we talked about birds.  We looked at different kind of feathers and talked about warmblooded animals and we looked at a real nest and other things, and then we dissected owl pellets!!!

One of my favourite activities. It's like a treasure hunt.

This is my friend, Amy, who's been helping me lately. I REALLY appreciate it. She even brought extra owl pellets from her back yard! My owl pellets were from Amazon cost $70 bucks! And even then I wasn't going to have enough for everyone. But with Amy's we did! THANK YOU!

I love how excited the Youngers were when they found a skull or jawbone. The olders were a little grossed out (I just need to brake them in more I guess, silly kids) but most got into it, and look at this cool bird foot one of my science kids found in their pellets:


And now we will wait--and wait--until we do mammals. I guess we could do it virtually, but honestly, you could just watch youtube videos instead. It's about being together in person, seeing things and touching things! I'm bummed.

Sunday, November 15, 2020

Fish and Amphibians

 For science, we kept on learning the different classes of animals.

First we learned about fish. We made a "swim bladder," did a couple harmless experiments on real fish, and dissected a fish...which was not harmless.



The next week we learned about Amphibians. We tried to jump as far as frogs can jump, we had a pollywog handout, and we dissected a frog. Do Canadians call them pollywogs, or is it just my English mother that drilled that into me?