Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Fun with Ant Hills


Today in school we read Scholastic's The Magic School Bus Gets Ants In Its Pants- A Book about Ants. Bean enjoyed this book about Ms. Frizzle and her class shrinking down in their magic school bus to learn about ants and their jobs!


The back of book features a neat project for parents and kids to do together. Fortunately for us, and unfortunately for our poor yard, we have no shortage of ants around right now. Red ants in fact, which seem quite resistant to all treatment we have tried so far, but that is another story for another day. Red ants and all, no humans or ants were harmed by this experiment!

The project in the book called for filling several jar lids with different foods, specifically honey, salt, maple syrup, and flour. We had ran out of honey, so I substituted some brown sugar.


The instructions told us to place the lids in a circle about one yard from the anthill, and then to answer some questions. First we made some hypotheses about what we thought would happen, and answered the questions based on those. Then we went outside to observe!

The questions were as follows: 1) How long does it take the ants to find the food? 2) Which food or foods do the ants seem to like best? 3) What do you notice about the way the ants travel to the food? 4) How do you think the ants tell one another about food?


We sat and waited and in under a minute the ants had found the brown sugar.


We waited a little bit longer, and after about a minute the ants went for the flour.


The ants still had not gone near the salt or the maple syrup. The ant in the brown sugar must have notified the rest of his buddies because we now had a steady little stream of ants going to the brown sugar and carrying little pieces of it back to the hill.


After five minutes there were still no ants in the salt, or the maple syrup.



After our five minute time period was up we answered our questions and compared our hypotheses to the actual outcome. What we found was that we were mostly correct on the first question-ants would find the food in a minute or less. On the second question, Bean had thought they would find the maple syrup first, when it ended up being the brown sugar. For the third question Bean had guessed that a lot of ants would come to the jar lids. We noticed that for the most part it was one ant who found the food first and then more would show up. On the fourth question, Bean had guessed they would wiggle to tell the others. Clearly, they did have some communication which is why after the one left the hill, the rest came to start carrying the sugar back to the hill. Overall, we were surprised that they never came close to the maple syrup, and that they seemed interested in the flour.

It was a fun little experiment, and was very easy since it was just basic household staples. We learned some things about ants and were able to work on our very basic scientific method.

Monday, September 12, 2011

Field Trip to Kingsley Plantation


On Sunday we decided to take a family field trip to Kingsley Plantation on Fort George Island. The plantation includes a barn, main house, garden, slaves quarters, and dock area. I went to the National Parks website and was able to print Bean out a kid's map of the area, which also provided some brief information on each of the stops at the plantation. Additionally, the park website also had some activity sheets the kids can fill out during and after the trip.


Kingsley Plantation is named after Zephaniah Kingsley who purchased the plantation in 1814. Zephaniah's wife Anna managed the plantation. An interesting tidbit about Anna, was that Zephaniah bought her as a slave in 1806 when she was thirteen years old, and by 1811 he had married her, freed her from slavery, and had three children with her. Anna managed the plantation until somewhere in the 1830's when her and the children moved to Haiti because of the American discriminatory laws that were enacted when the United States took control of Florida that would threaten their family. She eventually returned to Florida, where she died in 1870.

Our first stop was the gardens where we learned about the major crops grown on the plantation, which were: Cotton, indigo, sugar cane, potatoes, and several others. We also came across this cute little gopher turtle.


Our next stop was the barn, where they kept cows and chickens. Additionally, they stored tools and some slaves worked and slept in the barn.




The barn was made out of tabby, which is a concrete made from oyster shells, sand and water. The look of it was really neat.


After the barn we headed down to the kitchen, which along with the main house, were unfortunately closed to the public.


The kitchen was connected to the main house which is where Zephaniah Kingsley and previously other plantation owners and their families lived. The home was actually built in 1798, which makes it the oldest plantation house that is still standing in the state of Florida!


The plantation is situated along the St. Johns River. The grounds are so beautiful here, I could have stayed here all day!!


On our way back from the dock, we saw a park ranger and she told us that the activity sheet Bean was filling out would actually allow her to become a junior park ranger when she completed it! We sat down on a bench to finish her worksheet and the ranger came back and looked over her sheet, asked her some questions, and had her recite their pledge "explore, learn, protect". Then she pinned a junior park ranger badge on Bean. She was so excited!


To top off our day of fun when we were leaving Ft. George Island, it is a pretty long narrow road with tons of beautiful mossy oak, hickory, and palm trees. Up ahead in the road we saw some big birds and when we got closer we realized that it was a group of peacocks, which is apparently referred to as a "muster"-who'da thunk it? I was so excited to see them I nearly screamed, and then another car was coming down the road so we had to hurry and drive on, but not before I caught a couple not so great pictures!



We had a great day and I am excited to go back, and explore the rest of our state parks!

Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Adventures in Ancient Egypt


This past week we learned all about Ancient Egypt. Using both Story of the World and Galloping the Globe as well as some other wonderful literature resources we really learned a great deal about this country and its rich history. I can definitely say I learned as much as my little one!

We started off with basic map work of the country and drawing the flag. From there we read a few great books I had picked up from the library.


Cleopatra by Diane Stanley was a great read. Although packed with a lot of information, it really kept Bean's interest up. There was a lot I did not know about Cleopatra, she was quite the woman. I love for Bean to learn about strong female historical characters! Girl power!

Another book we thoroughly enjoyed this week was Hatshepsut, First Female Pharaoh. Bean could not wait for us to read this. Lots of fascinating info in this book, and we split the reading into two days, and learned a great deal! I wouldn't call myself a history buff by any means, but apparently this first grade history might have me changing my ways!


After reading Hatshepsut, we decided we would make pharaoh collars. The book I had initially seen the idea for this is used felt for the collars, but we substituted yellow construction paper and that worked out just fine. I cut a template out of four pieces of construction paper, and let her decorate each one with die cuts and sequins. Once they were dry we pieced them together and let her try it on!



At the end of the week, we read a book called The Day of Ahmed's secret by Florence H. Parry. Bean enjoyed this book about a young Egyptian boy who surprised his family with his new ability to write his own name. Bean was fascinated that this little boy had a job and worked to support his family.


After we read this book, we decide to make a cartouche. I cut some construction paper out -a bit wonky because the hieroglyphics printed out a bit larger than I expected, and I didn't feel like trying to shrink them! I printed out a chart with the whole Egyptian alphabet from http://www.rom.on.ca/programs/activities/egypt/learn/alphabet.php?media=print and then I found the individual hieroglyphics from this website:

I had already printed out the letters for her name, so we just went through the alphabet chart and then she picked out the appropriate letter and glued it on her cartouche.