Country of the Dolls

Sometimes the way children play can be disturbing. For example, when they manage to find every doll in the house…..

I will admit I played with Barbie’s as a child (as unlikely as that seems), but I don’t remember having any baby dolls after I accidently (yes, it was an accident) pulled the head off my baby alive.

I swear that one just moved! Don't look at me like that! It did! It's the Bride of Chucky! Gaahhhh!!

When the girls go into doll mode I swear I feel like I’m in a horror film. Give me snakes and spiders any day! Just keep the creepy dolls away from me!

What toy do you wish you could throw out? Not because it’s loud or annoying, but it just gets under your skin for some uncanny reason.

Week Three

General
It is now Thursday, three weeks in. Tamarin's interest in school is still strong. She is eating up Draw Write Now. I can't believe how fast she's doing the copy work. BTW Draw Write Now is part of the new Kindle Unlimited Program.

Tamarin has been reading the Buddy Files Series which are also on Kindle Unlimited.

Lemur's interest in school work is beginning to wane. I'm going to drop Draw Write Now. The copy work is a little much for her. I think I'll try again in another 6 months.

This week Teach Your Monster to Read launched an apple app. I may just get it since our internet has been slow or not existent over the last two weeks. She hasn't gotten to play on the website much. The moment I realize we have service again I tend to hog the computer :p

Science
RSO Life had us playing with banana peels for our hands on echinoderm experiment. I'm not completely sure how educational it was, but they had a great time doing it anyway :)

Echinoderms


We watched a couple of the under water episodes of Magic School Bus  (Mussel Beach, season 4, episode 3 and Takes a Dive, season 4, episode 13) on Netflix and I got Tamarin to point out the different animals she saw and if they were Cnidarians, Mollusks, or Echinoderms. She didn't do half bad :)

We also starting watching the series "The Blue Planet: A Natural History of the Oceans" on netflix (also on Amazon Prime). They focus a lot on bioluminescent deep water fish in the first couple of episodes which the girls find fascinating, but since it didn't focus as much on corals and other soft body ocean animals that we've been studying we'll probably pull it back out when we study fish in a couple of weeks.

Arthropods!

The girls were impressed by the butterfly life cycle set! I'll have to order caterpillars next year when the weather will be nice enough for us to release them outside. By the time they'd get here and go through their metamorphosis it would probably be too cold.

There is a BBC documentary, "The Story of the Butterfly" on Amazon Prime and I believe Hulu plus has it as well. We didn't finish it because our internet service has been hit or miss. They promise to fix it next week.... which is what they've been saying for over a month....

I sent them outside to catch as many bugs as they could. They came back with one black bug and a dozen ants. The black bug escaped before we could ID him with the insect guides. Then we put the ants in our empty ant farm. Hopefully we will have better luck with them this year. (Worm update! We've been watching the layers shrink and drop in our mason jar as the worms eat their oats. It's pretty cool!)

Of course we watched the Magic School Bus ant episode (season 1, episode 12) and the bee episode (season 3, episode 1). Also there is a Wild Kratts butterfly episode (season 1, episode 8), which I didn't feel the need to watch again since they were saying, "Just like on Wild Kratts!" during the entire lesson.....

RSO has three separate lessons for arthropods, butterflies, spiders, and crustaceans. Next week will be spiders and crustaceans.

Week Two

Schooling over breakfast.

This week we gained some new household pets. RSO Life suggests you go outside to find worms and snails for your experiments. I don't think these people expected us to be doing these experiments in July. No matter how deep I dug, no worms. No matter what we looked under, no snails. Just too dry and hot. Which leads me to what I learned this week. Did you know fishing worms are labeled "taxable grocery" at 7-11? The imagination runs wild.

So we saved some worms from a fishy grave.

 

I don't know that they are enjoying their mason jar, but I hope to move them to our old ant farm as soon as I get the chance so we can see their tunnels more clearly :)

Worms!

 

I could not find land snails for the life of me! I called a bunch of shops. Apparently they aren't profitable to sell :p Go figure. So we settled for aquatic snails which were a challenge to measure, but we did our best.

Mollusks



None of the pictures in these books held a candle to the pictures we found on pinterest. Mass printing just can't do justice to the colors!

I had planned on picking up some frozen squid to make calamari, but never got to it this week. I'm sure they wouldn't have liked it and I would have gorged. I LOVE calamari....... Probably for the better that I never got to it... I've already gained enough weight for this babe and I've got two months left!