Thursday, October 13, 2005

Desert Diorama

This is a desert life diorama that the girls and Daniel made this week as part of our unit study on deserts. We've mostly been reading about the desert climate and plants so far. Today and tomorrow we will learn more about the creatures of the desert. Today is camels, which was what Danya has been waiting for. She's been interested in Camels since they read a story about them on "Between the Lions" a while back.

So this diorama kicks off our creature lessons. We also got some neat Reader's Digest videos that explore different regions of the world. They've watched one about Egypt and life in the desert there. Today they'll be watching another about the desert in Australia. I've been having trouble finding truly age appropriate books about Egypt for the girls. So we've also done little mini readings about another topic of interest for the girls, Greek myths. They watched Disney's "Hercules" recently, so we spent a day reading some stories about other Greek myths and a more accurate version of the Hercules myth. Here's a link to the book they liked best: Why Spiders Spin It's called "Why Spiders Spin: A Story of Arachne" by Jamie and Scott Simons. I thought it tied in nicely with last week's bug theme, too.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

We're finishing up a desert unit study and it's been so great!! We've read,
"Camels Don't Ski" by Francesca Simon for fun and "Narni of the Desert" by Peter Warner (a funky old book that was perfect for the study.) Also, "Songbird of the Nile" Your blog is fun to read!
Kate

Brooke Lorren said...

Good job dd's!