Happy Groundhog Day!

Either if you are hoping for an early spring or looking forward to more winter fun I hope you have a happy Groundhog Day!
I think Groundhog Day is kind of a fun tradition.  We like to watch Punxsutawney Phil make his prediction every year.  We also like to look at the Groundhog Day website.  There are lots of fun things to explore with the kids there.  I think this is a good time to discuss the weather and the field of meteorology.  I just found out that only 39% of the time the Groundhog Day prediction actually becomes true.  Not much worse than the regular weather people I suppose. LOL  It is also a fun time to talk about and play with shadows.
There are some great books for children about Goundhog Day.  Our favorite is A Garden For Groundhog.

 

We have had this book since our boys were tiny and still enjoy it every year.  It is a funny story of how the farmer tries to outsmart the groundhog and stop him from eating all his vegetables. 

Tomorrow I am planning on doing some shadow matching activities with Christian.  I found this one this evening and even though it is for the book Brown Bear Brown Bear I think it will work well for him.

For Tyler I created a worksheet because I know he won't want to be left out.

Groundhog Day Timeline of Observations Worksheet
 

I think we will have a fun Groundhog Day and I hope you do too!

New Printables

Tyler has started reading Hans Brinker this last week and is studying The Netherlands along with the book.  I have created a couple of worksheets for him so far and I thought I would post them here just in case anybody might be interested.  They are all research based.  I like him to search out the information.  We mostly use the encyclopedia and assorted other good books to locate the answers.
The first one is about windmills.  He did this one on Friday and really enjoyed it.  We are also going to make a windmill this week.  A good link for that is http://www.creative-science.org.uk/paperwindmills.html.

Windmills Worksheet

The next worksheet is about the canals of Amsterdam.  We did this one with the second chapter of Hans Brinker because it talks about the children skating on the canals.  A couple of good links to go with this worksheet are:

http://www.aviewoncities.com/amsterdam/canals.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canals_of_Amsterdam

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canal

Canals of Amsterdam Worksheet

The last worksheet is about ice skating which is popular in the Netherlands but I made it mostly to go with Hans Brinker.

Ice Skating Worksheet

That's all I have so far but then again we are only on the third chapter so I am sure there will be more in the future.  We are really loving Hans Brinker and the Netherlands so far.