Raising Kingdom Trained Champions: ...That Thirsty and Waterless Land.

Our theme this month was the Desert. My final decision in repeating this theme (most of my themes have been repeats of what I had used while teaching Kindergarten) came about on a hike we took on Martin Luther King Day. We were discussing the desert we live in with the boys and they refused to believe that we lived in the desert (It didn't help that we had gotten a late start and they were starting to get really tired). In K's words: "We don't live in the desert, there's not a lot of sand." I knew right then that we would definitely be learning more about deserts in February.

"He led you through the vast desert, that thirsty and waterless land." Deuteronomy 8:15 When I first started planning for the theme, I was excited yet not sure in which direction I would go with our theme. I, of course, headed to Pinterest for ideas where I realized very quickly that searching for "desert" only led me to boards of "desserts". Ha. Thankfully a friend led me to looking for habitats which brought up some much greater ideas. It led me to a site that focused on Moses and his journey through the desert as their Bible study. This revelation opened up somewhere to start. So for the past several weeks, we have been studying Moses, the Israelites, and their long journey through the desert.

CACTI

The first week, we focused our studies on different types of Cacti (the Saguaro Cactus, Prickly Pear Cactus, Barrel Cactus and even discussed Yucca's a little bit since we had been studying the Letter Y that week.) Some of the things we learned were:

life cycle of a cactus
how a cactus stores water
how a cactus protects itself
how slow a cactus grows
that flowers grow on cacti
how we can benefit from a cactus (it's flowers..we discussed prickly pear jam)
what happens to a cactus when it falls
how a cactus can become a hotel

Reading Rainbow: Desert Giant (This was very informative!) We also kind of watch the Magic School Bus: Desert, but it was from the library and well, it was scratched. AGAIN!)

We even made our own cacti-------

This....

became this!!

Shaping our Cacti---

Adding Our Needles:

The Final Product:

Matching Cacti Shapes

Life Cycle of a Cacti book.

A last minute trip to the zoo gave us a great visual of what we had been learning.

They quickly noticed the holes that the animals had made for their "hotel"

We tried to do the Desert Walk, but it was....

BUMMER!! We are going to try again with a friend next week.

Checking out what a real cactus feels like.

DIRT

We also studied dirt the first week in Science. We learned that dirt is made up of rocks, dead plants and dead animals. We did an experiment that allowed us to see the rocks separated from the dead plants.

Checking out the dirt we got from our back yard.

Filling it up with water...then we shook it well.

To separate the parts. The leaves floated to the top, the rocks sunk.

Journaling our findings.

Habitats and Animals

The last several weeks, we continued to study the desert by looking at the word "habitat" and what it means. We discussed the different animals that have made their habitat in the desert and how they are able to survive through the heat. We finished up our theme with our own desert habitat!