ECC Week 10 Days 4-5 Brazil and other stuff

I cant believe we only have one more week left in South America! It'll be with sad faces that we pack our bags to move on to other lands. But if we must, we must!

I sheepishly admit that we have not been playing the geography game for South America that came w/ our curriculum. Instead, the girls have enjoyed testing their speed w/ labeling the South American countries at Sheppardsoftware.com. So far, Ariel holds the record-getting all the countries of South and Central America right in 33 seconds!

Yesterday the girls did their 'pretty verses' where they write out the memory verse for the week and then decorate the page. This week they decorated it with rainforest themed pictures
*CLICK ANY IMAGE TO ENLARGE*

We also added a few more animals to our Amazon rainforest collage

Our vocab cards for the week:

DELTA

JUNGLE

Then, oh joy of joys, we went to the zoo! For school of course.

We have one of the best zoos on the whole planet with an AMAZING indoor jungle. So I took the girls to explore and made a little worksheet for them which I'll show you towards the end. I typed out a bunch of South American animals and they had to see if they could find that animal at the zoo and then write down its Latin name and any fun info about it if they wanted to...

Here is a picture of the rainforest from the top level. We had fun imagining ourselves in the rainforest and picturing the different levels. The girls determined in this picture that we were about at the understory level....

I'm not quite sure if these next two guys are from South America, but holy cuteness, Batman. HAD to get a picture of them.

Here begins our South American animals....

Note: these fish are one of the largest fresh water fish in the world. They look to be almost 6 feet long! We just got done watching our Jeff Corwin video on the Amazon, and he had these fish featured in his movie-the girls thought that was pretty neat.

Two-Towed Sloth: I dont think he's changed position in the last 4 years...though we DID learn on the Jeff Corwin video that they do come down to the bottom of the tree to, *ahem* 'do their business' and they only do that every 7-10 days!

These creatures aren't native to South America though sometimes I think they are DIRECT decendants of the howler monkeys...

Here is the worksheet I made for the older 2. The younger 2 just wrote down the animals name on a sheet of loose leaf paper if they wanted to

Once we got home, it was time to finish the rest of our school, which wasnt much given that Fridays are 'light days' with My Father's World (we LOVE that).

We really enjoyed watching the Jeff Corwin movie on the Amazon and would recommend it if your library has it. It's a Discovery School movie and its title is 'The Amazon: Aquatic Ecosystem'.

I finished up week 3 of my training plan this morning! 4 miles in 41minutes. WOO HOO! I discovered a site a few months back www.mapmyrun.com where you can map your run before or after to find your distance. I have been adding my workouts at www.dailymile.com It will be fun to look back after I have been tracking them for a few months to see the progress (hopefully!).

Way off subject, can you believe Christmas is just over 3 months away?!