School @ Home: Avis Study

This week we started attending our camp's pilot educational program called CBX Outdoor Science Lab! Three of our amazing staff at camp have lead, planned and prepared a monthly program for homeschoolers to attend with their parents that covers experiential science! 

This month was Avis study (or for non-sciency folks like me... birds.)

It was always my intention to attend the monthly "labs" and then spend the month covering that topic in a "unit" approach. It would give the information and knowledge I need to kick off the month with some fresh and fun ideas! 

Additionally the CBX staff has provided a great book list for our local library and an amazing pinterest board with experiments, activities, crafts and ideas already pretty much planned out for me! 

The really amazing thing was that we were already planning on covering The Story About Ping in our SOTW unit on China... and we read Tikki Tikki Tembo which illustrates some pretty cool birds.

Today I decided to pull out my old bag o' tricks from my traditional schooling days and put up 3 enrichment centers on art, science and literature.

Center #1: The Story About Ping Water Color Center

We don't often do painting, but seeing the amazing and inspiring watercolor illustrations in this book I said, "What the hay!" 

Center #2: Bird Part Identification

Again, not really a "work-sheety" person, but  this seems like a good opportunity to use some skills of looking and identifying the parts the make a bird a bird...

Center #3: Tikki Tikki Tembo Vibrant Marker Coloring

I want my children to pay attention to the colors that are used in this book and how it gives a unique feel to this story that is specifically Chinese in nature. We also did a fun activity about this book that resolves why it is that Chinese typically name their children with short names... (because Tikki Tikki Tembo almost died because his name was so long.) We made a list of long and short names in our family. We had fun laughing at how long Isaiah Allan Kizito's name is and how short Eli's is in comparison.