Science puppets

Where are we now in science?  Compared to last year, I feel more confident to stray away from lesson plans to spend time on areas that catch our interest, hence the 'delay' in progression along the plan.  To remind myself and Tiger of where we are in terms of science curriculum coverage since we started in September, we did a quick revision of classification.

We are still doing Life Science, learning about Classification of Animals.  More specifically, we are now starting to learn about the differences between Vertebrate and Invertebrate.  The book shown below is scientific yet child-friendly, and has been immensely helpful to help Tiger learn and remember the 5 major groups of vertebrate:

Where we are in the curriculum asked us to make up animal stories using puppets.  Storytelling is an interesting way to learn science concepts.  Since we did not have animal puppets, we set about making our own using this book:

The instructions from the book are very straightforward.  Making each puppet involved many coloured craft papers, lots of cutting and gluing, some drawing of shapes and a little bit of colouring in.

We decided to concentrate on the Vertebrate puppets this time so I had Tiger identify the relevant animals from the content page before we proceeded to make them.

Hare, Goat, Hippo

Frog and Bird

Sheep, Walrus, Racoon, Hen, Beaver

Bat, Pig, Crocodile, Giraffe, Duck

We put up puppet shows with different stories for the animal casts, and basically just played around with them for a long time.

Most of the stories that Tiger made up during the free play session leaned more towards fantasy than facts, especially of animal behaviour and characteristics, so I suggested that he read the following book to get ideas for his next puppet show.  James Herriot worked as a vet so his knowledge and observations of animals are very accurate.  The challenge in getting children to learn science through storytelling is in helping them to find the balance between creating an interesting story and staying true to scientific facts. 

This post is linked up to several blog hops, where you can visit to see what other homeschoolers have been busy with.  It is also linked up to the February 27th edition of Hands-on Homeschooling Blog Carnival.