Hi, Future Ticia 2025, I’m updating this super old set of science lessons, this was part of our Land Animals Unit, which I clearly still need to make a landing page for. Note to self, do that soon.
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Beaver lesson resources
I’m rather amused that I never told everyone what we used for our Beaver lesson. I just hopped in and said, here’s what we did, so let me step in and tell you what we used, and some new materials I can recommend.
This all started from our Apologia Land Animals of the Sixth Day textbook.
Now at the time, I think we might have been using the Junior Notebooking Journal. MY 20/20 hindsight, use this only until 2nd grade, and even in 2nd grade you might be able to switch over to:
Land Animals Notebooking Journal, we started using this in 3rd grade, and I realized that we could probably have used them in 2nd grade and it had a lot of great material that my kids were probably ready for, but looking at it in the middle of 1st grade, they were not ready for it.
So, Homeschool Mom who is looking at curriculum for next year thinking, will my kid advance enough to be ready for that? If you’re not sure, hold off on making the purchase, no matter how good the sale is, because you will regret the purchase and wish you’d made another.
That’s your free tip.
But, if you’re not wanting an entire year on land animals, and maybe just wanted a small unit on beavers because you’ve been reading The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, then let me give you a couple of picture books to check out.
- Beaver Dams– the most intriguing aspect of beavers
- Beavers– these two have pictures, now on to one of my favorite nonfiction authors
- Beavers– I like Gail Gibbons books, so always keep an eye out for her books
My library also has a couple of Native American legends about beavers, but I opted not to include those on the list, but let you know that could be an interesting extension for the lesson.
Now, back to the beaver lesson
As we read about beavers in our chapter these past couple of weeks, I was intrigued by their similarities to us and decided we needed to do some fun beaver activities.
I was intrigued by this picture in the Apologia: Land Animals
The two biggest similarities to my mind was the entry ways, and the ventilation shaft, which to my mind looked a lot like a chimney. So they drew out the houses, along with occupants apparently, and identified everything.
On the inside they wrote down one way we were different. I assume this is Batman’s, and the big difference he wrote down: Beavers have to swim into their house. We walk into our house.
I had originally wanted for us to go and build a dam at a nearby park, but the weather hasn’t been cooperative for the past couple of weeks for us to build a dam outside on the days we’ve been able to go. Isn’t that just the way it goes? So we improvised.
We built it out of pillows and blankets. Actually, we did it twice. Once where the kids did it on their own, a second time where I acted as the current attempting to cause their dam to float down river. Naturally, there are no pictures of the second version because I spent it all tangled up in kid arms and legs as they tried to stop me.
We used pillows as sticks and blankets as mud. There have been nonstop requests to repeat this activity……. I wonder why.
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