Homeschool Unit Five: Zoos, Animal Habitats, and Diets

 We spent a couple of days talking about animal habitats and built our own nests for birds, mice, and rabbits.  We also made a cave for our bears.  After that, we started our big zoo project!  The kids built a zoo out of cardboard, paint, blocks, magnatiles, and lincoln logs. They made the appropriate habitat for each animal - sand for the camels, water for the anaconda, rocks for the lions, and trees for the giraffe.

They made maps of the zoo and all of the exhibits.

They performed wellness checks on all of the animals, including a weight and length measurement.  Nolan graphed the results to see which animal was the longest, shortest, heaviest, and lightest at the zoo.

We discussed animal diets, including herbivores, omnivores, and carnivores.  We determine which category each of our zoo animals belonged to and provided the appropriate meal for them. They used green rice to represent grass and provided .1 oz of grass to each herbivore using the scale.  They used math cubes for the meat and gave one cube to each carnivore.

We built a souvenir shop in our zoo.  The kids learned to identify each kind of coin and sorted them.  They used their coins to purchase different items at their shop.  One kid was the shopper while the other ran the cash register.  They both practiced counting money.  We noticed how dirty some of the coins were, so we used ketchup to clean them.  The vinegar and salt do a good job of this quickly.

The kids pretending they were zookeepers and made episodes promoting the different species at their zoo, Zootopia.  Nolan did awesome reports on the crocodiles, anaconda, and bullfrog.  Olivia covered the great cats - the tiger, lions, and black panther.  They both spoke so clearly and professionally.  I was SOO proud of how well they did with this.  

We studied alliteration and made names for each of our zoo animals.  We illustrated their clever names and put them together in our commemorative photo book.  It turned out so cute!

This unit was SO much fun for all of us!  They were so creative and curious and blew me away with their insightful questions and hard work.  Our homeschooling experience has been so wonderful for our family!