Science Sunday: Squirrels

We’re chugging along in our study of Land Animals, and we reached the Rodents chapter.  Apologia decided to split Rodents into 3 parts, and they flew through mice, and settled onto squirrel like rodents.  Or maybe that’s just what we did.

First I made a quick rodent animal sort.

Then the kids had a lot of fun sorting through the pictures and figuring out which ones were actually rodents and which ones weren’t.  It was made a little complicated by the fact that I didn’t always remember which animals I had there, until I studied it a bit better.

Then we read all about squirrels, how they move, what they eat, and where they live.  The kids were really intrigued by the idea of how squirrels climb and jump from tree to tree.  So I decided a field trip was in order.

We went to a local park that had a series of exercise equipment.  You know the kind that was popping up in parks all over during the 90s.

Or maybe that’s just Texas where they did that.  Either way it’s a familiar sight to me from my childhood/teens.  We followed the track around and at each of the different stations tried to climb it or act like a squirrel.

I even got in on the fun, though Batman’s finger is also part of the shot, and it’s not exactly a….. flattering shot.  But, we all tried climbing like squirrels, or jumping form place to place.

We decided that squirrels get a lot of exercise, and then I released them to run like squirrels on their own for a good 30 minutes at the playground while I walked around the track some more and got some more exercise.

It was a gorgeous day out, 70 something degrees, and perfect weather.  I was kind of wishing I had shorts on, but that was not so.  Of course, now 3 days later we have rain, and it’s in the 50s heading lower.

Texas…………

We ran out of time to finish up the other ideas I came up with as we were reading about squirrels, so expect to hear more about them later.

Oh, I had so many really cool ideas linked up last week that I saved some for a later week, there’s just some weeks where it’s just too many cool ideas.

Let’s see what others did this week:

Each week I’m spotlighting a few posts that were shared previously.  Many posts get linked up later in the week and they don’t always get as many clicks as they deserve, so I’m trying to spotlight a few every week.

I’m a sucker for messy projects (it’s not as obvious with our more recent lessons), so when Navigating By Joy shared how to make polymers (a new version I hadn’t seen before), I thought it looked like a blast.

Highhill Homeschool always has the best units, and her unit on cells has been just what I’ve come to expect from her.

Happiest Mom on the Blog shared a fun experiment with sodas.  I’m thinking it might also be interesting to use as a respiration experiment for anatomy.  I can’t quite decide.

<div align="center"><a href="https://ticiamessing.com/category/science-sunday/" title="Science Sunday"><img src="https://i1097.photobucket.com/albums/g344/Ticia1/AiMScienceSundaycopy.jpg" alt="Science Sunday" style="border:none;" /></a></div>