The desert is near and dear for Ms. Harmony as she grew up in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona! She shared just a bit of this experience with the school friends in late July this year.
In studying reptiles, we talked about these animals having scaly bodies like fish... but they are different because they don't have any gills! They don't live in the water. We painted on the bubble wrap-covered easel and stamped papers shaped like snakes on the wet paint.
Friend "Hammer" has been wanting to do Marble Works all summer! We made snake-slides for our marbles and it was so neat to send marbles down these twists and turns. The school friends were given a few pieces of track at a time and asked to connect them and see how the marbles moved through the channels. They worked through the trial and error process of learning about gravity, obstacles, gaps, slopes, and more.
In the desert, there are animals that can be hot and thirsty because it doesn't rain very much. Saguaro cacti are plants that are ONLY found in the Sonoran Desert of the southwest. They are covered in prickly spines to protect them from hungry animals, but there are some animals who build homes in the cacti anyways. :) After reading some books with real pictures of saguaros, prickly pear, and organ pipe cacti, we used play-doh and half-toothpicks to make our own cacti. Together, it made an adorable cactus garden.
