Flying Creatures Unit

As I’ve been working on different science lessons, I’ve been trying to tie them to specific units, and saying this is this type of science lesson, and I keep saying, “Oh we did this as part of our Flying Creatures Unit, when we covered Flying Creatures of the Fifth Day, let me go find that landing page.” Then I go and search my blog and discover there is none. I file the information away and say, “Self, I should do something about that,” and then the dog will try to eat something catastrophic, and I forget all about that need. Well, right now the dog is recovering from surgery because we had to extract a chicken bone from her digestive system, and I decided today is the day to put together my Flying Creatures Unit landing page. That’s right! I think this is one of our very first textbooks we did, and it is now one of the very last ones I’m organizing.

I really can’t say why I am the way I am, it’s a giant mystery. But let’s get started!

(There are so many affiliate links in here)

Flying Creatures Unit Resources

As I mentioned in every single post, or almost always do, when we studied our flying creatures unit, we were using:

• Apolgoia Flying Creatures of the Fifth Day– I love this textbook, but I will say it can be a bit overwhelming at times
• Flying Creatures Notebooking Pages– At the time, I didn’t know about these, I don’t know that I would have used it with my kids in kindergarten, BUT I do recommend these as a general rule, especially once your kids hit 2nd/3rd grade
• Flying Creatures Junior Notebooking Pages– The junior notebooking pages are perfect for 1st/2nd grade, and depending on your kindergartener, could be a good match. I don’t think it would have been good for my boys because in kindergarten,n they were not solid with writing yet, and this would have frustrated them too much
• Christian Kids Explore Biology– We also used this, it covers the same material but in much less depth, like we cover flying, swimming, land animals, AND anatomy in one year. So this is more of an overview

As I find other textbooks that would cover this, I’ll add them in, but these were the ones I have used and can recommend. I know there are others, but I haven’t personally used them to comment or add them in.

Most of the individual posts will have specific books recommended and additional YouTube videos as well, but because a video list for all of the topics covered in this topic would be too vast, and I don’t have a playlist, you’ll just have to check out each post for specific book suggestions.

How I’m going to organize this Flying Creatures Unit post

I’m going to organize this in the order Apologia’s chapters are, since most of these activities were written in response to a lesson from one of the chapters.

Now I know I don’t have posts for every single unit or chapter, and many of these posts won’t necessarily line up with those lessons, but that’s the best I can figure out. So here goes.

Flying Creatures Unit: Insects

Apologia starts off with Entomology. I very vividly remember this because we spent forever on this with the kids, and they loved it. We had a lot of projects that went great and some that did not go so well.

• Insect booklist– this is part of a series where I created booklists for My Father’s World kindergarten curriculum, which has “I is for Insect,” so it worked out well that we spent so much time on insects when we studied flying creatures.
• Insect KWL Chart– At the start of studying insects, we looked at what we knew about insects. This is a great learning tool you can use with any topic
• How do bugs see?– This was an interesting lesson, I’ll admit it somewhat depends on some gimmicky glasses I bought.
• Insect parts lesson– We played out this lesson several different ways, playing games AND making our insects with play dough, so much fun.
• Insect Camouflage– Another lesson that the kids had a lot of fun playing with.
• How do insects eat?– This was a really fun lesson and has the possibility of being a little messy at times.
• Design your own insect– The kids made so many insects when we did this.
• Very Hungry Caterpillar lesson– Science and reading at the same time, SCORE!

In this section of our Insect lessons, we are going into nature or observing individual insects.

• Water Striders observation
• Fireflies lesson
• Crickets observation
• Dragonfly lesson
• Somewhere I have a butterfly lesson as well, I will find it later

That took up the first 7 chapters of Flying Creatures, I’m not bothering to break that down into the particular chapters.

I do not have any activities particularly for Pterosaurs

At some point, I should make a generic dinosaur landing page, but most of my dinosaur activities end up being variations on dinosaur digs, which is kind of hilarious.

Though I do have a Preschool Dinosaur Unit.

Flying Creatures Unit: Birds

I was going to completely rebuild this, but then I realized, wait! I have an entire Birds Unit post already created, so why recreate that when it’s already done?

The only thing I don’t think I have included there is my Nest book list, but otherwise…

That will cover chapters 9-13.

Wow, I’m almost done! Yay! Go me!

Okay, I need to get serious here. It’s been a long week in my house. The dog had surgery, and she does not understand she shouldn’t be doing stupid things. It is making life hard.

Flying Creatures Unit: Bats

There is one chapter on bats, but at one point in time, one of my kids decided bats were his favorite creature, so we spent a lot of time learning about them and kept coming back to them. Now I need to see how many of these posts are actually worth keeping.

• How to rescue a bat– Okay, this is probably not one you’ll run into, but one time we rescued a bat, so this made an interesting science lesson of how to safely rescue a bat from the middle of the road
• Bat lesson– I’m gonna be honest, this post is not great yet, but it has the potential to be great