A Net in Time

Curriculum and book reviews, faith, homeschooling and more!

hands-on learning

millipede fun and much more

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today we studied millipedes.

the lad has been in to catching them lately so today I decided we could run with that.

We learned that they lay between 10-300 eggs at one time and they take a few weeks to hatch.

Having learned how to tell the boys from the girls we are pretty sure we have three boys and three girls.   Which would give us anywhere from 30 to 900 babies in one shot.   The lad was kept busy trying to imagine what 900 millipedes would look like.   Rather hard to imagine…and then if they each lived 10 years, we end up with 9000 and then if each of them had babies… WOW!!!  we’d have a million before you could even think about it…and since one of the books we are currently reading is “one Million Dots” the boy was simply amazed.

So by taking the time to pursue a lad’s interests we covered math, English, geography, science…graphing and spelling and using a magnifying glass and what not.

Very fun.  Very captivating for a six year old. 🙂

we let the guinea pigs out today after selling three of the adults we no longer wanted.   Nice to have them out on the grass and not crowded in their winter cages any longer. 🙂

Then we had a HOOT building cardboard equipment for knights and
having battles.   Duct tape, cardboard, sharp knives and regular tape…
all made for excellent fun and research and remembering all that we had
learned in studying knights.   We learned about adding some aluminum
foil to make knives look real.

The lad came up with the armour design himself.
I helped him figure out a holder for his quiver of arrow.  See the bow that he made himself?
Mommy?   What weapon can you make?   What will you be?  you can’t be a knight cause I’m a knight.
Okay.. I’ll be an assassin.  
What does an assassin do?
Oh.. they kill people in all kinds of different ways.
With potions mommy?   
yep.. and knives too.  
OH.. you should make a knife.  
So above you see my knife.
we made cardboard potions to.
The lad made this halberd all by himself.
He needed idea help to make the mace.
I made one too, just to even the score a little. 🙂
Showing me how he’s going to get me with the spear and halberd.
but he’s going to be a walking knight, not one with a horse.
 
and then before supper we had a rousing game of Knights after the assassins!!!!

 Where I unleashed my secret weapon…..a hand spear!

Complete with dad saying “isn’t this a better game to play outside?”  🙂

Monarch into Chrysallis

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Check out this youtube video.

Both monarchs that we have are going exploring. The one is currently hanging, the other is looking for a place to be safe. We’re having to keep a close eye on that one.

Hopefully in seven to 10 days we’ll have a couple of butterflies to watch! 🙂

our previous attempts at Monarchs failed, so we’re thrilled that this one appears to be working.

Monarch butterflies

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this is Chris.

he is a monarch butterfly.

we found his egg while camping.

He seems like a nice ‘lad’ (not that I know if he is a lad or not, but the lad we have is enjoying watching him grow).

We’ve successfully hatched out into adult stage a white Moth in the past, so we’re hoping to be successful with Chris the monarch as well.

This site is helpful in teaching more about monarchs.

We’re finding it an interesting experience. We lost one monarch egg to ants, we lost another when we changed out the leaves (they didn’t transition well), so we’re hopeful that this time will be more successful. Time will indeed tell.

That lad is VERY much into capturing caterpillars lately and seeing if we can get them to change into moths and butterflies lately.

His latest capture was a fuzzy red caterpillar that poops/pees and runs VERY fast when you attempt to catch him. It’s was quite the achievement for the lad to catch him. We’ve never had another caterpillar do that so it was quite the learning experience.

Some caterpillars we’ve learned don’t handle capture well so we don’t catch them. Some will just up and die. Others within a day or two will pupate. Others just wander and seem to do well in captivity. It’s been educational to say the least.