Antarctica Study Time!
Today was our monthly homeschool continent study. Last month, we did Asia. Today we learned about Antarctica. I think that the biggest irony is that it was the warmest day we have had in 2 months! 😉 However, we still had a great time! We started off with talking about the continent itself while looking at beautiful pictures of the land. We talked about how it is the driest, coldest, and windiest continent in the world. We talked about snow and how even though there is a lot of snow on Antarctica, because it is such cold snow, if you ,melt it down it would only be a few inches a year! To see how that can work, we brought in some plies of snow to see how much water is there after it is melted. After that we started to talk about the people who are on the continent. None of them live there all the time. They are all mostly researchers and live in elaborate base camps that have all the comforts of home in their frozen environment! We also talked about how the researchers will often head out into the field to do research. While there they must take everything they need for their trip. This includes their food! Having so many Boy Scouts in my family, means that we have access to some MREs (Meals Ready to Eat) like the researchers take to eat while in the field. So we cooked some of those up so everyone could try them. Let’s just say that they are not what I would try to eat. We also watched a movie that one of the people at the base camp took. They walk through the whole base camp so you can see what it looks like! Since we had some time before lunch, we got to make a penguin craft using thumb prints and paint. They loved making different scenes and getting a wee bit messy! 🙂 We ended the day with a very wintery lunch! Here are some pictures of all the fun! 🙂
So there you have it! Antarctica is ever a fascinating and frozen place, and yet there seems to be so much fun to be had learning about it! What are your favorite Antarctica learning activities?