The Full Wolf Moon ...
January 10, 2009
... is tonight!
So don't forget to take a peek out your window and admire the midwinter moon in all its celestial glory. In fact, the January full moon will be the biggest of 2009 - 14% bigger and 30% brighter than normal!
You might even invite your children to "howl" at tonight's moon, so named because Native Americans believed the wolves became restless at this harsh time of year. Here's a little poem from When the Moon is Full: A Lunar Year:
The weather chills,
the night is long,
wolf lifts his head
in lonely song.
His notes float high,
his notes drift low,
mournful in the
moonlight glow.
This will provide the perfect copywork for the cover page of our Winter Wolf Study - which we kick off this week!
As you can see from the sidebar on the left, we have lots of books on loan from the library for our study. (A few we do own, but most are borrowed. How I love inter-library loans ...)
Here are a few more notes on our upcoming study:
Field Trip ~
- With our Nature Study Club we'll visit a local wolf sanctuary. (Bill and I actually took our boys there years ago, but they hardly remember it - I believe Earlybird was in a sling!)
Map-work ~
- Where do wolves live in our world?
- Where does tundra exist?
Art ~
- We have a coloring page photocopied from this coloring book.
Science ~
- We'll discuss the concept of a food chain; Wolf Island illustrates this nicely.
Social Studies ~
- We'll research the history of wolf-related environmental legislation. (The Wolves are Back gives a lot of good information.)
Music/creative writing exercise ~
- We'll listen to Peter and the Wolf, and the boys will create their own versions of the story - in which the wolf is just seriously misunderstood. :)
Nature Study ~
- We'll look for animal tracks in the new snow - some might look canine. We'll check them against a field guide that shows the tracks of wolves, coyotes and dogs.
- We'll look at (possibly howl at) the Full Wolf Moon.
Literature ~
- Bookworm (who has already read Call of the Wild and White Fang), will read the Julie of the Wolves trilogy. Crackerjack will read the Classic Start versions of the London stories. Book reports will be assigned.
Puppet Play ~
- We have a cute set of arctic-theme puppets for Earlybird (it includes a wolf, a bear, a musk ox, a puffin and an Eskimo). We'll read Mama, Do You Love Me to go along with our puppets.
- We're going to explore this webpage: http://www.nwf.org/graywolf/ and I might pull a few activities from the Jan Brett First Dog teacher page.
Those are a lot of plans for the next few weeks, but for tonight, we'll just watch the sky. We might not get a glimpse of the moon though - the sky is thick with cloud cover. Instead, we'll keep our eyes peeled for the first flakes of snow, due to arrive any minute now ...
Well, I hope you are all enjoying your weekend. See you all again very soon!