Dogs

It is an understatement to say that Sarah and Daniel love dogs! Whenever we are out and they see one, it is, "ooohhhh, a .... " whatever the breed is, they know! Sounds so cute. For a while they had some type of half friendly competition going as to who had seen more dogs that day. Lately, whenever we are driving around, Tony & I have taken to saying, "dog on the right" or "dog on the left". It never fails to induce the 'oooohhhh, it's a ...." !
Naturally we did a unit study on dogs (Science - Living Things) in our homeschool, which so far has been the most popular unit study, though we didn't spend a lot of time on it. Sarah and Daniel actually knew more than I did! We studied dog classification, dog anatomy and dog groups. They did 3 or 4 artisitic paintings on canvases for Art, and for English we read a lot of Dog stories - fiction ones, plus non-fiction stories of working dogs in Australia. They wrote stories; drew a dog and had to write sentences using adjectives to describe their dog. They labelled a world map and pinpointed the origins of some dog breeds, for example, an Australian Dingo, a Mexican Chihuahua, a German (!) German Shepherd, an English Shetland Sheepdog and an African Hyena. We researched famous dogs in History and in well known writings. For example, Argos from 'The Odyssey' (the only one to recognise Odysseus when he returned home after 19yrs) and Laika - the first dog sent into space by Russia in 1957. Poor dog! While that was rather upsetting, Sarah & Daniel laughed their heads off about a dog named Saur. The King of Norway who ruled between 1104 and 1123 lost power, then regained it. He was so angry at the people, that he crowned his dog Saur as King, and demanded that people treat the dog as royalty. Saur ruled for 3 years and signed royal decrees with a paw print!
How popular do you suppose 'Dog Maths' was? VERY! I made up questions about the number of puppies in multiple litters, and similar things like that. I was able to find some activity sheets that required Sarah to multiply numbers across and down a grid and use the answers to solve a code. The final question was 'which breed of dog comes from Israel?' and the answer was a Canaan Dog. None of us had heard of this breed, so we looked it up on the internet to confirm it was real - and it is! This was a big surprise for Sarah, she thought she knew all the breeds! I also purchased a board game called Puppy Math, which is played by adding, subtracting or multiplying the numbers thrown on a dice, reducing that to a single number and moving that many places on the board. This was a popular game with Sarah & Daniel, and how could I say no when they asked to play it day after day, at any hour? LOL!

Most interesting was our learning about the Iditarod - an annual dog sled race in Alaska which commemorates the 1000km lifesaving run by a Siberian Husky named Balto, who delivered serum to the snow bound city of Nome and saved many children from a Diptheria epidemic. This touched them in a number of ways, and they understood a little more about the issues of immunisation and vaccination. Perhaps just before their next booster shot I can remind them of Balto!
Finally we drew a picture of the Canis Major (Great Dog) constellation in the northern hemisphere, and marked out Sirius, the brightest star in that constellation and known as the 'Dog Star'.

Did I mention we have our own dog? Yes, of course we do! A German Shepherd named Amos. Here are some photos.