The Lorax - Part 1

Yes we are busy with the Lorax from Dr Seuss

We learned about the man behind the stories: Dr Seuss

We watched the movie....

Here is the original Lorax movie.

and read the book.....

What did the Lorax teach us.

1. To recycle
2. To protect nature
3. To be content and not greedy
4. To talk to one another with respect and not call one another names, to not be rude to one another but polite.
5. We learned some words we never new existed. Words like "rippolous" and we had to decide what the word means to us.
6. We learned about ways to fight air pollution and other conservation tips

We also learned that:

We had lots of fun and used our imagination a lot.


We are combining it with two other books.

The great Kapok Tree.  and Meeting Trees. The last book we did not read but used the curriculum. Wish I had the book...

I was really glad to find this video, since I don' t have the book.

  

We did our science about:

poisonous plants and poisonous frogs. Jac's favorite the blue frog. We learned about the Kapok tree and how big it can grow.

We talked about the wild cats in the rain forests and how to "spot" the difference

We talked about the Bromelaid (this was really interesting to me) and polination of bees, and other insects like the  scrub beetle and the Giant water lily - Who knew this thing gets soooo big.

We talked about the different layers in a forest and where each animal lives.

We talked about camouflage, and how animals can disappear in the forest and you will never know they are there.

We learned about Erosion and Oxygen (Lollo's was helpful here)

We talked about leaf cutter ants and anteaters.  All living in the rain forests

In Geography we learned the following:

• Where all the rain forests are in the world
• Where South America is and also Brazil and the Rain forest
• We learned about the Tropic of Cancer, Capricorn and the equator
• We learned about Ecology - how to preserve the rain forest and what all the different food and household products, and medicine  we can get from the rain forest.
• About air/water/ground pollution
• About what causes pollution

We had fun with songs and poems and other language activities like finding all the big words in the stories and even writing our own poems and stories and talking about similes

For Social studies we talked about

• Father/son relationship
• Yanomamo people
• Uses of trees

In Maths one of the new topics we covered was Pi. 

I never knew maths could be cool as well. 

We combined it with drawing and learning about the tree trunk, and all the different parts of the tree as well.

In Zoology we learned about endangered animals and the watch-list that exist 

For nature study and a combination with art we did Bark and leaf rubbings.

We talked about Jonah (most of the time)

We also spoke about creation and the tree of life.

It is here we learned about the song and the woman behind the song : The tree of life

This is a short story about her life:  Fanny

This is a longer version  

Fanny Crosby - so we did a bit of church history as well.

We did not plant a tree, will do that once we are home again.

We did our art project on the tree of life.  I wanted to use Gustav Klimt but after seeing his other paintings I decided to stick to the biblical tree of life and let the kids just use their own imaginations.

In my next post I will post all the things the kids made.

Learning on the way

We are still in Turkey...

I decided to give Dr Seuss a try. Since I was always doing things in Afrikaans I never used his books, but now since I started with it... I fell in love.  We are doing the Lorax.
Before I get to the Lorax though, we did a little "on the way homeschooling" (what this means is that while I am actually doing something else one of the kids might get really interested in something in nature or another topic and then we will make a plan to learn more about it)  Right now it is Jac and dandelions.

I was actually amazed that they came from flowers?  You probably knew that already...

Here is a very nice video to show you how....

After watching the video we went outside to see what we could find. Lets start at the beginning. First we found the flower

Different stages of the flower closing

The flower

Here the dandelion is beginning to open up

Opening up some more

And more

And finally the whole seed head

We decided to see what will happen if you light the seed head on fire.

It went... poof! Burned in an instant

Here is a picture Jac made of a dandelion

You can read about dandelions here:
Dandelion

It has a couple of medicinal uses as well - I will be looking into that for myself, but for the kids right now they just enjoy the fantasy of dandelions.

I just loved this......