Can you guess what animal this is based on their observations and drawing?
1. He is small.
2. He has a small tail.
3. He eats bugs.
I’ll add the answer in a comment later today.
One of my goals for this year is to work on having more nature studies. I’m not very good at incorporating them into our week. I’m working on it. We took our notebooks to the nature center to have a nature study there. But I’m working on incorporating more and more.
This time we caught something in our garage and took it inside to study.
They were so proud of themselves. They drew a picture of him, and they each wrote three observations of the little guy. Then we went online and looked at different species of this animal and found out which species he was in particular.
I’ll give you a few more hints:
1. He’s not originally native to Texas, but was introduced from the Mediterranean (this is not a super helpful hint).
2. I was impressed at Batman’s being able to catch this quick little guy.
3. He’s also a Spiderman villain (only helpful to fellow comic book geeks).
Let’s see what others did this week:
Each week I’m spotlighting a few posts that were shared previously. Many posts get linked up later in the week and they don’t always get as many clicks as they deserve, so I’m trying to spotlight a few every week.
I love the new Science Experiment Form shared by Enchanted Homeschooling Mom. Very cute.
This is a fun magnet unit for preschoolers/early elementary. I love that she incorporated art and painting into her unit over at Living and Learning.
I loved this take on the dancing raisins experiment because she added in other things to try, which I’d never seen done before. Go read Happiest Mom on the Blog’s post and see which one danced the best.
I love the idea of bringing something inside and having them make observations. I have a had hard time with nature study, but this seems super fun.
I do too. This is part of my SMALL steps to doing more nature study.
Have you checked out the Handbook of Nature Study blog? That really helped me to get started with Nature Study.
I need to check it out again. I was reading it a few years ago, but haven’t as much lately. I do remember a lot of what they were sharing about at the time was rather regional to them, and I didn’t have it. But I need to try it again.
It looks like a lizard to me!
Or a gecko?
Oops, with all of the coughing and miserableness of bad allergies yesterday I forgot to say what it was.
It’s a Mediterranean Gecko, from Italy. It has apparently had no negative impact on the eco-system despite being brought over. I found that to be very interesting.
I would love to do more of this with my kids too. Collin goes to the Audubon Society for one week (this summer he actually do two weeks) of camp every summer and he loves the journaling that goes along with the hikes and nature studies.
How neat to be able to catch a gecko. Did you observe him climbing vertical walls – it’s pretty amazing!