Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Brrrrrr...... it's cold

With temperatures rather cold this week (I know in California we don't really know cold) it has been fun to start our study of our next biome, The Arctic Tundra. The kids got all excited when I pulled out the books about polar bears and and I am sure we will have to read some of our many whale books before this unit is over.

On Monday I brought our globe down from the high shelf and we all enjoyed finding the Arctic Circle and the Antarctic circles. We discussed why it stays so cold in these regions and that sometimes it says dark for days during the winter and light for days in the summer. We have only started reading our huge pile of books.
I can't believe how many books there are about this subject. We of course found a Jeff Corwin video where he goes to Alaska. We haven't watched it yet but will shortly I am sure. My kids have been really excited about a DVD I found at the library called Growing up Arctic. It has a number of episodes of an Animal Planet show called Growing up. Each episode shows how some baby arctic animal is rescued and either sent back out to the wild or finds a new home in a zoo. We all enjoyed watching the baby polar bear and the baby seal. We still have the Walrus and Penguin to watch.
I still need to figure out some sort of fun project to go along with this science unit. I know when we did our FIAR unit on the book "The very Last First Time" we made sugar cube igloos and they kids loved that. We may try that again.


On a side note... I went to look for this book at the library to read again for this unit and the library doesn't have it anymore. If I remember right, our library system had only one copy of the book. Now it is gone. They get rid of books that nobody checks out. It is always so sad when good books get taken off the library shelves.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

No, you don't really know cold. :)

But what great ideas you have for all the biomes. I'm taking notes, we should hit these, oh, probably not until February, at the rate we're going with science.