May fun day @ the pond

Today was a fun day. I do love field trips. :) I'm learning every day at home with the kids and are doing some fun stuff I enjoy and learning and exploring new stuff I never got a chance to do at school.

We went to explore, and learn all about pond life with other local homeschoolers for the last " fun day" of the school year.

First, we saw turtles lying on logs. Look at those baby turtles! Aren't they cute?



Then the kids was catching the tadpoles with their nets.. After that, it was off to find pond life for themselves. I learned that as tadpoles, they breathe with gills. And later, as frogs, they breathe with lungs.



J got lucky and found a diving beetle and later we were able to see it under the microscope on the TV. It had what looked like oars on a boat. Other pond creatures that other children found were seed shrimp which does a vibrating shake, water flea, and may fly which has 3 tails. We also saw a dragonfly nymph and learned the difference between complete (4 stages) and incomplete metamorphosis (3 stages).



Free time fun! This boy came up to me and wanted to give me the dandelions he picked. I say, oh that is so sweet. Your mom would love that. So he ran to give it to his mommy and then he came back and picked one more dandelion just for me. :)


Hi Lisa! J tried your curly and it worked like a charm. Thank you for the fun idea. There is Prime dipping his in the water to see if his will curl.


Then we went back for some cool learning and saw more cool creatures. Check them out on J's blog. She wanted to share the pictures and tell you what she saw and learned. I was quite surprised J actually raised her hand to answer a question (and got it right). She is usually shy and it's rare she will raise her hand to answer a question voluntarily unless she is feeling especially brave. I guess today was one of those days. Way to go, J!!

I learned depending what pond creatures you find, you will know about how good the water quality is.

Look what else we saw, a mommy robin. The woman there told me she is sitting on the eggs. Prime couldn't resist climbing a tree as we are leaving.