Spider Unit

We had a lot of fun over the last couple of weeks learning all about spiders.  I was hoping that once I learned more about spiders I wouldn’t be quite so scared of them.  But that didn’t happen.  They were still very interesting to learn about though, and I am still amazed at how much I learn now that I am homeschooling.

Here are just SOME of the things we did- there was just way too much to share everything!

Of course, we had to have a real spider to observe.  I tried not to look at it very often 😉

We learned how spiders eat their prey by injecting venom into it, which turns the insect into liquid and then the spider drinks the food.  We put our prey (a sugar cube) in a cup.  Then we injected it with venom (water) and drank our prey.

We also made these cute Spider Glyphs, which you can see here.

We played a fun game where we threw little plastic spiders onto this spider web I made on the floor and added up our scores.

We did a little experiment to learn why spiders don’t stick to their webs.  First Hailey put her fingers on a piece of masking tape and her fingers stuck to it.  Then she dipped her fingers in vegetable oil and tried it again, and her fingers did not stick.  Spiders make an oil that makes it so they do not stick to their webs.

  We read about the spider life cycle and then Hailey made this Life Cycle poster.

We sang a little spider song.  We sang it to the tune of 10 little Indians:
Crawl, crawl, crawl like a spider.
Crawl, crawl, crawl like a spider.
Crawl, crawl, crawl like a spider.
Crawl around your web.
We used different words in place of crawl like pounce, jump, etc.

If you click on the picture above, you can see some of the other fun things we did with spiders- made hats and some different fun snacks.

We made a Spider Schema chart.

Hailey matched up spider vocabulary words with their definitions.

Hunter and Hailey made an All About Spiders book.

Hailey observed our classroom spider and wrote down her observations.

We ended our unit with a Spider Report.  Hailey picked an interesting spider (she picked the tarantula) and wrote a report about them.  They really are very interesting, but if I ever saw one in person I don’t think I could handle it.

Many of the printables we used came from The Razzle Dazzle Classroom or A Day in First Grade.

We also watched these videos about spiders:

and

It was a fun and interesting unit, but I am glad I won’t have to look at anymore spiders for a while!

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Week in Review

We are taking a few weeks off from Heart of Dakota.  While there is a lot of information about the Pilgrims covered in HOD, I wanted to do a Thanksgiving unit that also focuses on the Native Americans.

I am using a fantastic Thanksgiving Unit from The Razzle Dazzle Classroom.  Last week we learned all about the Sioux Indians, and it was so much fun!

After we learned about the Sioux Indians- Hailey made this tee-pee and wrote some information about what she had learned about the Sioux.

We did this super fun mapping activity, which Hailey loved!  She said, “Wow, this is a lot of fun!”

I tried to convince Rich that we should make an actual tee-pee in our family room, but he did not share my enthusiasm.  So, instead I had Hailey and Hunter make these adorable tee-pees that I found on Pinterest.

Hailey is learning plural nouns vs singular nouns- she did a word sort with nouns, putting each word into the correct category.

She also did some worksheets to practice plural nouns.

We did a lot more, but I guess I didn’t take very many pictures.  I’ll try to do better this week 😉

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Veterans Day

We don’t have school today because of Veterans Day, but I decided to do a quick little activity.

First we read “The Veterans Day Visitor” by Peter Catalanotto and Pamela Schembri.  It was a pretty good story for explaining why we observe Veterans Day.

Then we made some soldiers that I saw on Pinterest.

Hunter working on his soldier.

Hailey and Hunter’s soldiers.

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Heart of Dakota- BLHFHG Unit 7

I am trying to catch up on my posts, so I am doing another post this week about what we have been doing in school.  I get too confused and can’t remember what we did which week when I get behind!  So, here is a summary of what we did last week:

History:

This week we learned that the Pilgrims decided to leave Holland and head to America.  They would have to leave all of their friends and would not be able to bring very much with them.

I saw this cute idea at The First Grade Parade.  Hailey had to pretend she could only bring one suitcase with her and decide what she would bring.  I thought her answers were cute.

Language Arts:

While reading our adventure book we created this staircase.  Each step has a problem that happened during the story written on it.  As the problem was solved Hailey colored that step.

Math:

In math Hailey is learning to add with double digits.  She practiced by using pennies and ones and dimes for tens.

Unit Study:

We finished up learning about bats this week (several of the activities we did came from Batty for Bats and Stellaluna), and the started a unit about spiders.

We learned how a mother bat uses her sense of smell to find her baby bat.  I dipped cotton balls into different things like vinegar, vanilla, coffee and perfume.  I let Hailey pick a “baby” and then I blindfolded her and had her find her “baby” using her sense of smell.

Hailey made this project as part of the super fun Stellaluna unit we did.

The inside.

Hailey wrote an acrostic poem about bats.

Hailey just started a spider unit and this was our first experiment.  We learned how spiders eat their prey by injecting venom into it, which turns the insect into liquid and then the spider drinks the food.  We put our prey (a sugar cube) in a cup.  Then we injected it with venom (water) and drank our prey.

It was a really fun week!!

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