Summer Science Lessons

We do all year round schooling. Our school work is lighter in the summer months, of course. This summer we decided to study life cycles and construct lap books. A newly discovered teaching technique that I love doing with the kiddos. So far we have learned about butterflies, frogs, ants, chickens and bees. With each project we have had the opportunity to do some hands on studies except with the frogs. I missed the opportunity to find frog eggs much to my daughter's disappointment. Our neighbor have 2 backyard chickens that we had the opportunity to pet sit while they were away on holiday. We kept a daily journal and ate fresh eggs for a week. We had a Butterfly habitat and watched painted lady butterflies form chrysalis, hatch and then released them into the wild. We have a ant farm that we have been observing all summer and had the opportunity to visit a bee hive at a zoo. It has been a fun adventure. Next we are learning about worms. I ordered a mini Wormery kit from insect lore. Along with it came a coupon for free worm eggs wrapped in clay cocoons. They sent us 30 cocoons/eggs in the mail and slowly over the past 2 months we find a small worm has hatched. So far 20 or so worms have hatched. The kids and I have been keeping a observation log and have recorded what we have seen. First of all I never knew worms laid eggs and we even observed one escaping thru it's shell. Today, we observed the worm nursery and noticed that the soil is starting to change. Must be all the worms that are now in the soil. We also removed the soil and started to look for the worms to see how much larger they have grown since hatching. We were able to find 6 or 7 and they have definitely gotten larger since we first hatched them. We will only keep the worms til the end of August and then will release them into our vegetable garden. This has been a fun project and we are learning lots. Enjoy the pictures (the one with the worm hatching from it's egg is a bit blurry but it is a baby worm:)