Little Man wants to be a cryptozoologist. He wants to find a living dinosaur! He has wanted to for several years already. Unlike his older sister, who changes what she wants to be when she grows up as often as she changes clothes, Little Man has had the same dream since he was four years old. Occasionally he talks about being a race car driver or a farmer or a Snowbird pilot, but he always comes back to finding a dinosaur in Africa.
Do you know what a cryptozoologist is? I didn't until recently. Cryptozoology, as defined by Wikipedia, is "a pseudoscience involving the search for animals whose existence has not been proven. This includes looking for living examples of animals that are considered extinct, such as dinosaurs; animals whose existence lacks physical evidence but which appear in myths, legends, or are reported, such as Bigfoot".
Little Man wants to be a cryptozoologist. He wants to find a living dinosaur! He has wanted to for several years already. Unlike his older sister, who changes what she wants to be when she grows up as often as she changes clothes, Little Man has had the same dream since he was four years old. Occasionally he talks about being a race car driver or a farmer or a Snowbird pilot, but he always comes back to finding a dinosaur in Africa.
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While Little Man was watching "his" cedar waxwing babies grow, Princess had a nest she was keeping an eye on too. "Her" nest belonged to a mourning dove. She got great pictures, not only of the babies, but also of the mother dove! I will let her tell you all about "her" mourning doves herself.
My seven year old son, Little Man, found a nest with four eggs in it and he has been watching it and taking pictures of it all summer. He agreed to do a guest post for my blog to tell us about "his" baby birds :)
Munchkin, our preschooler, loves animals of all kinds, but her favourites are definitely farm animals! (She is a true farm girl!) She is also my only child who really loves doing book work and work sheets. When the other two were preschool age, we mostly played and if they learned something, great, if not, that was okay. Also, if we did not do any school, it was not a big deal because they were not ready for it anyway. Munchkin is completely different! She wants to do school every day, all the time! She is quick to tell me when her work box is empty and ask if I can give her more school work to do! So, we started a new unit study on animals, consisting mostly of things I can find to keep her busy while I am working with her brother and sister.
Last week we met a couple of other homeschool families at the Science Center and had a fun-filled day! The Science Center had a special display with life-size, animatronic dinosaurs, which is what attracted us to make the two and a half hour drive to the city.
We are still pretty busy with the garden, but I am starting to think ahead to the new school year. For science this year we will be studying Apologia's Exploring Creation With Botany (*Not an affiliate link!). I was going through it to see what kind of supplies I need to get for the experiments and I realized that a lot of the activities would be best done outside in the summer. I decided that on the days we are not processing our garden produce I will try to do activities from our Exploring Creation With Botany book. We have been having a lot of fun since we started that!
I posted before about the Ant Factory that we started this spring. Since then we have been having so much fun learning about ants!
I mentioned in my strawberry post that strawberries are one of my favourite fruits, but one I like even better is raspberries! I would quite happily eat all our raspberries fresh and forget about finding recipes to use them in! But I did my best to curb my desire to eat them all fresh and found some other things to do with them with the kids.
Around our place we are starting to see signs that we only have a couple more weeks of summer and then we will be jumping into the autumn harvest. The next few weeks will start getting really busy with bringing in our garden produce too. When that is done we will be able to get into the new school year. That means more math and reading and more structured learning again. But for now, we are still having a lot of fun learning through our summer unschooling and teachable moments!
Lemon Balm is one of the plants we learned about when we read through the Herb Fairies books. I got excited about it and bought a plant, and then found out from friends who have tried it that it is only an annual where we live and it won't come back the next spring. I was disappointed, especially since I did not actually use my lemon balm the summer I planted it. I wanted it to put down good roots so I left it alone. Boy, was I in for a happy surprise this spring when I saw that my lemon balm not only came back, but it had spread it's seeds and I had lemon balm coming up all over my flower garden! I must have somehow found a good spot where it was happy :) This summer I am finally going to try some of those lemon balm recipes from the Herb Fairies!
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