Halloween: the flying mammal

Bats must be one of the most misunderstood creatures there are.  Horror movies and vampire legends really don't help us undestand this incredibly useful, natural insecticide.

Now that dusk comes earlier, we often see bats flying around in our garden.  The ones that we around here are the very common pipistrelle bats, which we were lucky to see upclose:

We also learned about many different types of bats here.  Tiger built a bat box to be put up in the garden, just to give our flying friends a little helping hand.

Just for fun, we had a quick read of this Halloween-themed book:

This post is linked up to:
1) All Year Round Blog Carnival: Autumn
2) Enchanted Thursdays Blog Hop #36
3) Homeschool Mother's Journal: November 2, 2012
4) Collage Friday
5) TGIF Linky Party #54
6) It's a Wrap
7) Favourite Resources: November 2, 2012
8) Weekly Wrap-Up
9) Science Sunday

It is also featured on It's a Wrap.

It depends on how you see it

Towards the end of chapter 1's lesson plan for Marguerite Makes a Book, there is an entire section about the eye -- anatomy of the human eye, labelling the parts, ... all the works.  I was wondering how I would enhance this part of the lesson to be more hands-on when my glass broke.

Wow, I couldn't have timed it better!  So off we went to the optometrist.   Tiger was involved in the whole process of selecting a new pair of frame for me, seeing how the eye test was done, asking the optometrist many questions about how the presciptions for glasses are made, and waiting days to collect the new pair of glasses.

Having learned about the human eye, we then moved on to animal vision.  We followed the link in the lessonplan and watched a fascinating cow eye dissection video.  Maybe a few years down the road we will embark on actual dissection, but for now we are happy to just see how it is done.

We attended a workshop about animal vision at the Natural History Museum where we learned about:
- how scientists at the Natural History Museum uncovered the earliest known eye;
- how eye adaptations allow individuals to escape predators and locate prey;
- how bees and butterflies can detect ultraviolet light, which helps the process of pollination.

This post is linked up to several blog hops, where you can visit to see what other homeschoolers have been busy with.