Spiders
It was unplanned, but we started learning about spiders when the girls were eating their lunch on the porch, and I walked out to find Mildred trying to identify a harvestman (Daddy Longlegs) while looking at a picture of a tarantula.
She asked Annie to count its legs to see if it was an insect or a spider.
Seven? They were stumped.
In the following weeks, we found more spiders to study.
This one's an orb weaver.
We observed and learned about common house spiders, cellar spiders, funnel web weavers, black and yellow argiopes, crab spiders, ground spiders, and others. I've never liked spiders before, but I was completely fascinated. Home schooling rocks.
8 comments :
ok, that last pic is making my skin crawl!
It's strange, but my lifelong dislike of spiders must be shifting, because I thought that spider was cool.
Maybe you just need to study them up close...real close.
hehehe.
That last shot is amazing---
It is really creepy-the creepiest I've seen, and I have seen A LOT of spiders. Our home is like Arachnidtopia.
You, too, huh? I sometimes imagine them living in colonies of the old heating duct and creeping in the window cracks... At least now I can identify them properly!
IN the heating duct.
aboard, about, above, across, after, against, along, amid, among, around, at, before, behind, below, beneath, beside, between, beyond, but, by, down, during, except, for, from, IN, into, like, near, of, off, on, over, past, since, through, throughout, to...
Thank you, Mr. Blakeney, for teaching me the prepositions to the tune of "Gilligan's Island" in fifth grade. It didn't even matter that I'd never seen the show, I still remember the prepositions even when I don't use them properly.
The End.
Yeah it does!!
We need a good bug book. We make up names for the creepers we find. Are there Ant Lions in N. America? These things are amazing. They live in little funnels in the dust, and when an ant mistakenly slips into the funnel and is knocking dust down the edges as it crawls out again, it wakes up the ant lion, which sends out a quick flick of it's enormous (in comparison) pincher, and drags the ant below the surface, like one succumbing to quick-sand. Griff can catch ants for the ant-lion indefinitely. Literally F O R H O U R S!!!
We also need ("need" is used loosely here) a more exhaustive bug book, but I've read about ant lions before! There are some species in the good ol' USA, but they're primarily found in arid regions (Duh. Hello, Kalacha.), so unless we travel westward, we won't be able to share Griff's good times.
A shame, really, because it sounds incredibly fun!
My bug ignorance.
Only one species of ant lion in the US digs those sand-pit traps, but it may be found in New York, so now I need to look for loose, sandy dirt to see if I can spy one.
Now we know.
(All this thanks to random searching of the Internet when learning about caddis flies...I got a bit off track today and ended up looking up ant lions instead. Oh, well.)
Post a Comment