Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Throwing out the School Books

~at least for this week~

 

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Goodbye Handwriting, Goodbye Math!  This week, our home school is going outside the classroom.

Today’s exciting adventure is brought to you by our local park.  It was so nice of them to post signs identifying trees!  What a great place to go study during our final week of learning about trees.

This lovely tree is the Pin Oak.  As Mary noticed, it’s leaves have little prickly “pins” on them.  Guess we know why they call it a Pin Oak!

 

 

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How could you not be amazed at the Pin Oak’s cool, striped acorns?!

 

 

 

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Danny, my kindergartener, enjoyed journaling by copying the tree name, tracing the leaves and adding lots of other neat details.

 

 

 

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She just couldn’t believe all the “Sarah S’s” in this word.  She counted them and she traced them with her fingers.

 

 

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The kids were a bit nervous about checking out the hollow place in this Maple tree after all the books we have read about animals making their home in trees.  Curiosity prevailed.

 

 

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“Wow, Mom!  Look at these trees!”

 

 

 

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The Pine trees had so many fun things to pick up and study.

 

 

In all, we studied about one dozen trees today.  We added several pages to our learning journals and I took lots of pictures.  Later in the week, I hope to print out the photos and let the kids put together their own tree identification book. 

This is my favorite kind of teaching and learning.  We had so much fun leaving the classroom this morning.  Whether you home school, public school, private school or un-school… Get out in your local parks and explore the details all around you.  Even us “grown-ups” will see things we have never noticed before!

2 comments:

  1. Awesome!! Looks like lots of fun :)! We are studying apples and are visiting the apple orchard later this week, FUN STUFF indeed!

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  2. Looks like great fun! I was planning on starting a leaf study with Sammy in our yard next week - we'll have to go to the park too. :)

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