Katherine's Biome Project

This girl knew right away what she wanted to do. Kind of anyway.

When she first began talking about her biome project, Katherine wanted to research the red-eyed tree frog. OK. No problem. They're pretty cute...even if they are deadly.

Then, she decided on the toucan. Even better. I'm pretty fond of toucans. Isn't there a yummy breakfast cereal out there that features a toucan?

We went to the zoo during spring break, the added bonus there being that Katherine could see a real live toucan (or several) and not just base her knowledge on what she'd read in books or on-line.

Once we returned and recuperated from our zoo trip, Katherine began making a list of important facts about toucans. Then she grouped them and dictated her paragraphs. I learned a lot on that day...of course we never studied the rainforest when I was in school. It's a darned good thing that I have so many kids. I'm going to need their educations just to keep up. Imagine all that I'd be missing if they weren't in school!*

The next day, for we never work too quickly and it was spring break after all, she made a picture of what her diorama would look like and labeled the parts. Then she made a list of what she needed to actually construct her diorama. On Saturday, we went to Michael's and bought a piece of green felt, some craft glue, some green leaves and some rainforest animal stickers.

Then the making began. She twisted old lunchbags around pipe cleaners to make trees and put the leaves on the tops to make the canopy. I hot glued the trees to the rainforest floor. Once that dried, she wound embroidery floss around the trees and through the leaves for vines and draped them down to the rainforest floor. Then she added 2 toucan stickers, a spider, a snail & a snake.

The projects were due today. Because of our crazy schedule this week I had to take the 3 little ones to a friend's house early so she could drive them all to school - my 3 and her 4! She has a BIG van and an even bigger heart! Anyway, The last thing I told my girl was, "Don't let anyone sit on that!" Can't you just picture it now!

*I won't even get into how much I wouldn't be able to do on the computer without my kiddos around. As an aside, did anyone notice that I changed my template - all by myself, thank you! That's not to say I didn't hold my breath and think twice about waiting for someone to be home to help me do it. Just jumped right in...after reading the small print several times. As I stated above, we don't do anything quickly around here!