Building skeletons

Niamh has been cutting out and putting together some skeletons this week, and has enjoyed playing this online game of putting a skeleton back together:

http://sv.berkeley.edu/showcase/pages/bones.html
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The great sunflower race is on!

We have all planted two sunflower seeds each, and are now having a competition to see whose is going to grow the tallest.

Our froggies tails have disappeared, so time to set them free.

They are perfect little frogs now, with beautiful colourings, and so very tiny too.


This is the pond that we got the frogspawn from. All the frogspawn has now gone, and although we could not spot other frogs here, there were loads of tadpoles. It made us wonder if our tadpoles had gone through and accelerated growth in the tank, with constant food supplied to them throughout the day.

Niamh pointing one of our frogs after it had been put in the pond, it was great to see them swimming under the water, they hadn't done much of that in our tank due to limited space with all the plants.

Measuring heart beats

Mommy measured our heart beats on our wrist after being in the garden playing:
Eden - 88 beats per minute
Niamh - 88 beats per minute
Jude - 94 beats per minute

We then ran around the garden to get our hearts beating faster, and mommy took our heart beats again, unfortunately she could not find Eden and Judes, so after exercise:
Niamh - 124 beats per minute.

Learning about the heart

We used this heart experiment to show how the heart pumps and moves the blood out of the heart and into the body with each pump. (Of course a real heart is a lot more complex).

Learning about cells!

Again Eden enjoyed doing a biology picture - this time that of a human cell. She very much wanted to learn the names of the parts inside, so went over it all, golgi complex, mitochondria, nucleus etc, it is really fascinating.

We have frogs!

We didn't have to worry about them drowning after all, as they used the plants to climb up on the get their cute little heads out of the water. Eden was the first to discover the little frog coming up and came shrieking outside in excitement to announce the news. What a wonderful learning experience this has been for us all, and marvellous once again to witness first hand God's beautiful and incredible creation, we will definitely be collecting more frog eggs next spring.




The frogs weren't the only creatures growing well in the tank. Unbeknown to us we had lots of tiny tiny snails when we collected the pond water. They have grown a lot too, and also been a lot of fun to watch.

The tadpoles have front legs !

As soon as the tadpoles got front legs, they seemed to look a lot more like frogs. We were quite concerned about their lungs taking over from the gills, as we were not sure when this would happen. We have heard of other families having tadpoles who drowned because they had nowhere to climb up to when they turned to frogs and used their lungs.



He is clearly not using his lungs yet, so not a frog yet.

Our tadpoles have legs!

It is the moment we have all been waiting for, and it was as exciting as we had expected. We were so amazed last week to see little back legs coming out of our not so little tadpoles. They continue to grow well, we have read that we need to start feeding them meat soon, so that will be next, I am sure they will grow really big really fast when we start to give them meat.

Learning about History

We have come across this wonderful gem on amazon, it is an audio book of a complete overview of history presented chronologically beginning with Ancient civilizations, and ending at World War 2. It is told at the perfect level for younger children, and mom and dad are learning a lot too, it makes for great entertainment in the car.
We also read this book for our history. A lot of the stories are the same as the above audio, but it is reinforced as it is told with different detail, or in a different way, and is just as interesting to read.