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.