Taking Time Tuseday~ Arctic Learning Fun!

Well today took a fun and very different turn then I thought it would! That is all the fun of following the child! The girls headed down to the school room mid morning and got to work. After a small bit of time, Bunny started working with packing peanut sculpture. She and I (I couldn't resist it) both made a snowflake shape, but they weren't the strongest shape. Then she decided to make an igloo. I thought that was a good idea and let her get to work (without me)! She did an amazing job building the whole thing. She made a roof and everything! Well I thought that she would love to get out the Arctic Toob Figures to put in her igloo and I was right! She loved it. This got us started talking about the difference between the Arctic and Antarctica. We started by talking about directions (North South, East, West) and about a compass. I told her how a compass is on a map to help us see where things are. I then showed her a bit about how  compass works. This is a work that we will have to revisit, but it helped with the discussion about how the Arctic Circle is in the Northern part of the world, and Antarctica is in the southern part. After that I took her up to the computer to check out some pictures and videos of the people in the Arctic. Well, this led us to also looking at Polar Bears in a video and she really took off on this theme. So I found a PBS Nature episode about Polar Bears and we watched it during lunch. I was surprised to find the girls sat through it all and Bunny really was absorbing the information.

Pup was hard at work today too!

Here is Bunny working really hard on her igloo!

Pup pulled out the continent boxes! Although she pulled things out of all the boxes at once (creating quite a little mess) she also laid the animals out on the continent puzzle! Too cute!

Here we are working on where the Arctic Circle is.

Here we are watching some Arctic videos on the Internet.

 This one is where some natives are building an igloo!

Here is lunch and Polar Bears. Lots of information and fun!

After Lunch I wanted Bunny to draw a picture and she thought that was a great idea! She made a polar bear, and narrated a report!

Under the Polar Bear is a seal in the water.

and on the back is an igloo!



Well, my next move was a spur of the moment and a bit crazy! I decided to take the girls to the zoo to spend some time with the Arctic animals there, especially the Polar Bear! So we bundled up (It is only about 22 degrees outside here) and off we went on our Arctic adventure! It was great! We had the zoo pretty much to ourselves and we really got to sit and study the polar bears and the seals in the warm Arctic building! We watched the bears wandering around and we sat and read some books we brought with us while we did! Then we had a chance to see one bear up close when he sat down against the window! The girls loved it, and it was great to see the bear so close, to see his paws, his ears, and his thick fur. It was such a great, peaceful learning exprirence. Especially since we were able to see seals in the same building. This allowed us to talk about food chains and we followed the food chain from sea plants to fish, from fish to bigger fish, from bigger fish to seal, from seals to polar bears, from polar bears to men (some Arctic natives eat polar bears).

Here is our polar bear.

See how close they were able to get? It was really cool!

Here is a seal. They are really hard to get a picture of since they are moving so fast and they are under water!

After our time with the polar bears and seals, we headed back outside to see the arctic wolves!

Arent they cute? Bunny was interested since she saw a few of them in the Nature video that we watched. They were hunting caribou.



We talked about so many different things today and it was really wonderful! I love spur of the moment learning that is all about following the child! I think that the girls learned alot about the Arctic today and I love it when they can really experience things for real that you are learning about! I love so much that Homeschooling allows us to do that. Learning is an amazing journey and I love being able to have so much fun doing it! Happy Schooling!