We've been wrapping up the semester this last couple of weeks.  We will still do school the first couple weeks of December but we will have light days to make room for Christmas activities.

 

A few weeks ago we went to the library to listen to a man speak who had been observing a pair of Great Horned Owls for fifteen years.  He had some wonderful pictures and videos of the owls and we learned a lot about them.  The kids immediately wanted to learn more so we checked out some books about owls and read them at home.  Then we decided to draw a picture of a Great Horned Owl in our nature journals.  We followed some step by step directions I found on the Internet to draw our owls.  Since we have also been studying Lewis and Clark's journey across the west, we decided to blend the two subjects in our journals.  After the boys finished their owls (which we spent several days on), they wrote down facts about their owls in the margins around the owl just like in Lewis and Clark's journals.  We found some great pictures of their actual journal pages online.

 

Here is Adelaide's owl.  I was very impressed with her owl.  It's hard to see beneath the coloring she did but she followed the directions really well and had a great looking owl.  She even 'wrote' on the sides.

This is Gavin's owl.

This is Austin's owl.

We are almost finished with our Anatomy study.  We have one week left in our book.  We will be studying birds in the spring semester.  We are finishing up our reading about the War of 1812.  We haven't done any kind of crafts or activities for the War of 1812.