unit study: snails

 so, homeschooling is in full swing around here and while I do encourage the kids to do some self directed learning we do like to get together and do family unit studies at least once a month.... so in August our topic was ......

SNAILS

 We spent some time making some places for our garden snails to hide from predators

 and some time making snail families.... out of clay

 and then we took on the garden science experiment to discover how many snails lived in  our garden.... 

we marked 50 snails with dark blue non toxic paint

 recorded data

 were very curious

 held a snail olympics (not really)

but we did study their behaviors and mannerisms

 found out each one had an individual personality

 and even got a little silly

 we discovered in our garden that we have about 650 snails. we went back a week later and collected as many as we could in the same amount of time it took us to find the 1st 50 at the same time of day. apparently when you divide that number (50) by the number you found you get the approximate number of snails in your garden.

I love doing unit studies with the kids. I think there is sometimes more that you can learn as a group from one another. We did some other stuff too. A snail lapbook from homeschoolshare.com as well as some water color paintings of snails. we read a few good online articles here & here and even wrote a few creative tales about them! My younger kids even did some fun phonics printables about them!

and this time anyway, we even remembered to take a few photos! and videos!!