Hello all! I hope you had a wonderful two weeks. Ours has been extremely busy and filled to the rim, but we had a great time. The topic this past two weeks has been "habitat". I knew that we had already explored the habitats of the forest, field and pond on other adventures we had taken, so I tried to focus more on some new ones that Esther had never experienced before. Luckily, our backyard is one large wetland which I have been chomping at the bit to explore. We are in the midst of bow hunting season and we don't have any bright orange attire so we didn't explore as much as I wanted, but it was fun.
Examining the mud!
We also visited a river and discussed the difference between a river and a pond. (no picture since camera was left at home) We also took a trip to our local USDA extension office (thanks for the idea Michelle!) And got to talk to a lovely women who explained about the different types of wetlands, and even loaned us some great videos and books.
We played Habitat Bingo and I was surprised at which animals Esther already knew and even which habitat to put them in.
By chance I was in a store in in their clearance aisle I found these great playdogh sets where you create and animal and its surrounding habitat. Esther loved this and it was a lot easier than my plan of using random recycled materials to create our own animals. Here is her rabbit in its forest habitat.
For our final activity I gave Esther some paint and paper, then let her create her own picture. She decided to make a pond with a "big" turtle living in it. (that would be the big purple blob)
By the end of the week, I think she was beginning to grasp the idea that there were different habitats with different animals in them and she is starting to categorize the animals into their different habitats. I had several ideas for other games, but sadly not the time. I may try to work on them still, especially since this topic of Habitat can easily be brought up again on our future explorations.
Thanks for joining us, if you and your little ones did some nature exploration this past week, please feel free to link up below. If you are just joining us, please feel free to try one of the past topics, or our new topic which will be posted in the next 24 hours.
Your welcome and your activities are great! The habitat bingo looks like fun - I should try that. I am working on my post and will try to post it tomorrow. As usual, thanks for encouraging me to involve my younger kids in nature study. They are loving it. I have one problem though ~ now I am not getting my older kids involved!
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