This year Nathan (3rd grade) will be studying Zoology 3:  Land Animal of the Sixth Day and the Periodic Table at our homeschool co-op.  It’s shaping up to be a GREAT year with these two very interesting subjects!

Here’s the description of the Zoology 3 book from the Apologia Science website: 

What separates people from apes? How can a Great Dane be related to a Chihuahua? Is there evidence that people and dinosaurs lived at the same time? What should you do if you encounter a bear? How can you tell if a snake is poisonous? Come find out answers to these questions and many, many more with Apologia’s Exploring Creation with Zoology 3! This third book in the zoology series takes students on a safari through jungles, deserts, forests, farms, and even their own backyard to explore, examine and enjoy the enchanting creatures God designed to inhabit the terrain. Families will snuggle together and discover the amazing animals from primates to parasites, kangaroos to caimans, and turtles to terrifying T-Rexs— this safari doesn’t end there! Students will also keep a record of where each animal is found on a map and learn to identify animal tracks. As with all the Apologia elementary books, students will continue the practice of narration, keeping a notebook of what they have learned, and enjoy many hands on projects and experiments throughout the course.

Zoology 3 doesn’t cover classification since it was thoroughly covered in Zoology 1 and Zoology 2.  One of the moms on our Admin Team, Laura, who always has her eye out for things which apply to any of our co-op classes, shared the link for a free classification lesson she found on BrainPop.  It was a great review for those of us who have covered animal classification in the past and it was a great introduction for those who haven’t.  THANKS for finding this, Laura!

Here’s the review of our co-op’s first Zoology class a week ago yesterday:
This week in science, we discussed how God’s word separates the land animals into three groups: livestock, wild animals and creatures that move along the ground. This lead into a discussion on classifying animals and why we classify them. We also touched on predators and prey, habituation and the fact that all animals were originally herbivores.

We then had two stations set up. Our first station was the activity at the end of the chapter. The children were the predators and the M&M’s were the prey. This was a great lesson on natural selection and camouflage. For our second station, Grandma Blake had some children group animals into certain classifications. Then another group had to guess how the animals had been classified.

For those who enjoy lapbooks, here’s a free Classification Lapbook which one of our moms found.  Instead of doing any lapbooks this year, we’re not going to use the new Jr Notebook from Apologia which goes with this textbook.  We’re very excited to start it!

Chapter 1 also covers several careers which involve animals including zoologist so to round out our Chapter 1 activities, yesterday our co-op’s elementary Zoology Team invited a fellow homeschooling mom who works at the local Zoo to come visit us!  She brought three animals:

Madagascar Hissing Cockroach:

Turkey Vulture:

Python:

These were a BIG HIT with the elementary kids!  This class is typically just for 1st through 6th grade kids, however, we knew the Kindergarteners would also enjoy seeing the animals so they were also invited to join the older kids for this guest speaker.
It’s shaping up to be a GREAT YEAR and I want to give a shout out to our Zoology Team – Kristi & Traci as well as Chris and Grandma Blake who are on the same elmentary science team even though their focus will be a Chemistry unit for this age group a little bit later in the year.  Thanks, ladies!