Thursday, September 17, 2009

My Side of the Mountain

We have ventured into "Frontierland" for school. The first book we read was My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George. I highly recommend this great read aloud for anyone who has boys who love nature!

To introduce the theme, we visited our local nature center in Fontana where we...
made nature journals,
learned about snakes,
turtles,
and other critters local to our area,
and had fun examining nature!

We also visited the San Bernardino County Museum where we located all the birds mentioned in the book in the "bird room" and saw some other neat live animals, but I forgot my camera!

And this week we made it up to Mount Baldy with the purpose of going on a hike, but all hiking trails were closed due to high fire danger. So in place of hiking we made good use of our time by:
visiting the Mount Baldy Nature Center,
learning a little more about turtles,
playing in the tents and tepees at the nature center,
finding out how old trees are by counting their rings,
measuring diameter of trees,
enjoying the fresh mountain air,
and ended our mountain excursion by
reading a chapter from My Side of the Mountains in the mountains!

We love our field trips!

3 comments:

Becky said...

We love turtles. Those might be one of those pets we could handle. You know, your homeschool activities look like the best! I'm positive they're learning so much more than the public school kids. Do you want to adopt my kids between the hours of 9-3? :)

Ruth said...

I would love your field trips, too. That looks like so much fun with kids of all ages involved. Love it!

Jenn said...

w funny! I just read that book last month. Great for boys!