The Birds and the Bees...

...not like that folks!

With another school year wrapping up, I thought we would finish the year with a short unit on our feathered friends. Sophie and Christian really enjoyed the biology they did this year for science with my dear friend Michelle; so to continue on, we thought we'd talk birds.  Armed with a few reference books we learnt about everything there is to know about birds. We also manged to take a short and unfortunate fruitless trip out to Frank Lake the day before another one of our spring snow storms blew in for a visit. We did not see a single bird! Apparently this was the highlight of our study though...possibly because we hit Tim Horton's in High River on the way home.

 Another small project I had the girls and Christian do, was to pick a type of ecosystem; and design a bird that could successfully live in that ecosystem They drew a picture, wrote and presented a short paragraph about their "bird" to explain their design.

I'm hoping that IF and I say IF the weather starts improving and warming up, we will be able to make a short trip to the marsh down the road from us to observe birds. On my daily walks without the crew, I've manged to spot some mountain bluebirds, tree swallows, red winged black birds and some ducks. I"m hoping that the bird watching just won't be  a unit study, but something that will be continuous and possibly turn into a hobby for us.

Speaking of hobbies, we have new tenants on our acreage. At the end of April, we welcomed two hives worth of honey bees onto our acreage. Dave and his mom built two top bar bee hives and both boys had the task of  painting them.

Last week, the bees arrived in two boxes, and Dave and his mom transferred them into the hives.

We placed the hives in the back corral, not far from our vegetable garden.  It will be a good place for them because of all the clover and dandelions in the corral and they will pollinate our veggies!
We are very excited about this new venture. Hopefully losses will not be significant considering that since the bees were moved to their new home we have not had spring like weather...at all.
Nevertheless we are looking forward to the honey we will eventually reap from the hives!
This as well, has become a very serendipitous moment in our homeschooling journey.

Just another reason to love homeschooling and love acreage living. Where else can you learn about the birds and the bees?