A praying mantis! Am I right? Okay, I'm just kidding.
My children found a praying mantis on our front porch in early-mid November. At least, I think that's when it was. Emma and I tag-teamed and caught it, and put it in our little critter carrier - one of those plastic boxes with a vented lid which we keep handy for just such an occasion. We had a fish tank sitting empty with no fish, so the girls got busy and cleaned that out while Isaac and I zipped over to purchase crickets, a mesh and coconut bedding. We found some nice climbing sticks, and with a small plastic dish for water we got our new friend settled into her home. I don't normally keep living creatures we find outside as permanent residents, but I knew this mantid was nearing the end of her life if left outside, and thought in this case it would be all right.
I haven't found any good living books about mantids, so if you know of one, I'd love for you to share it with me. I went to my trusty
Handbook of Nature Study for information, only to learn that Miss Comstock didn't cover them in her volume. I was able to learn a bit from our nature guides, and beyond that, I'm just going to share what we've observed about her while she's been with us.
We named her Scipio Alfred Manty, a name which seemed to fit this elegant insect. It happens to be a boy's name, because we assumed she was a boy and had no idea how to figure out whether she was or not when she first came to us. However, after some searching on the internet, I learned that females have five abdominal sections, while males have more. We counted - a task made simpler because she spends most of her time hanging upside down on the lid of her cage - and found five sections. At least, we were pretty sure. It's hard to tell through the mesh and I wasn't keen to try to flip her over when we had her out of the cage. Our suspicions of her being female were confirmed last week when she laid a large egg case. I'm in the process of procuring something that will hold the little mantids when they hatch, because otherwise I think we'll have at least a hundred of the little beasties running around the house, and that would fun for no one except the cats.
So, what have we observed about this beautiful creature? First, she has become quite used to me and my family, and can distinguish between us. She seems to trust me most, and is fairly comfortable with the girls holding her, but she is not as keen to hang out with Isaac, although you can see from the picture that she has been amenable to hanging out with him occasionally. It did take her a few days before she determined she could trust us not to hurt her, but once she decided to like us, she would come right over and climb out on a proffered hand when we lifted the lid of her cage.
She doesn't seem to be able to see underneath herself at all. Her eyes are
positioned on top of her head, and when she climbs on us, she feels carefully with each foot to make sure she has solid footing before proceeding. Her eyes themselves are fascinating. Sometimes they appear to be clear with small black pupils, while at other times they are completely black. I read that because they are diurnal, or prefer the day, their daytime eyesight is better than their night vision, and her eyes do seem to darken at night, so perhaps that has something to do with it.
She is an amazing predator. The first time we put a cricket in her cage, we watched her head turn quickly as she locked her gaze on her unfortunate prey. We weren't able to see her capture it, but a short while later we found her happily munching away, hanging from the top of her cage. Her jaws are incredible. Perhaps all insects have mandibles like this, or at least the carnivorous ones, but this is the first time I've been able to observe them in action up close. They have several parts and seem to operate from side to side, rather than up and down as people's do. We were able to feed her a cricket from a pair of tweezers and observe her eating up close. I tried to post a video, but I'm having an issue with it, so I'll try to fix it when my in-house tech support gets home.
Let's see, what else? She has wings, but prefers to walk. She's never tried to fly, and we've had her out all over the house, climbing on us and the furniture. Her front legs have some wicked spikes on them, and it
hurts when she stabs with them! She got Emma's hand while we were trying to catch her, and once I made the mistake of trying to pick her up and she got my finger. I didn't make that mistake again! She can climb just about anything, although last night she did slip off a plastic spray bottle on our side table (kept for squirting naughty kittens away from the Christmas tree).
When she's observing something, she sways back and forth. She reminds me of a snake charmer when she does that. I read that it might help her distinguish something moving (such as prey) from the rest of her surroundings. In the wild it also seems to help with camouflage.
She is quite fastidious and often cleans her feet. She is very cat-like in that way.
Since she laid her eggs, she's slowed down quite a bit and seems less agile. I'm afraid her time with us might be nearing its end, and indeed, if she had remained outside she would have laid her eggs and perished with the first frost. I'm delighted to have had a few weeks observing and getting to know her. I never thought I'd welcome an insect into the house like this, but we've had a great time and learned lots.
We named her Scipio Alfred Manty, a name which seemed to fit this elegant insect. It happens to be a boy's name, because we assumed she was a boy and had no idea how to figure out whether she was or not when she first came to us. However, after some searching on the internet, I learned that females have five abdominal sections, while males have more. We counted - a task made simpler because she spends most of her time hanging upside down on the lid of her cage - and found five sections. At least, we were pretty sure. It's hard to tell through the mesh and I wasn't keen to try to flip her over when we had her out of the cage. Our suspicions of her being female were confirmed last week when she laid a large egg case. I'm in the process of procuring something that will hold the little mantids when they hatch, because otherwise I think we'll have at least a hundred of the little beasties running around the house, and that would fun for no one except the cats.
When she's observing something, she sways back and forth. She reminds me of a snake charmer when she does that. I read that it might help her distinguish something moving (such as prey) from the rest of her surroundings. In the wild it also seems to help with camouflage.
On the day after Halloween, Isaac and I made a quick trip to Lowe's, looking for a couple of things for a science project, and he found some little pie pumpkins in the gardening section. He really wanted to make them into pumpkin pies, or so he told me. I agreed to buy two of them, and he came home a very happy boy.
When we got home, he informed me he wanted to carve the pumpkins into jack-o'-lanterns. That was not in my game plan for the day, so we compromised on him drawing faces on the pumpkins with marker. He got Abbie to help them, and they had a great time with their faces. I'll leave it to you to determine which child drew which face.
As soon as they were done, Isaac was instantly ready to carve the pumpkins. Do you know what he brought out for us to use? His child-safe knives, and children's bowls and spoons from Ikea. Bless him, he did, in fact, carve his own pumpkin with his little knife (to which he referred as his "chainsaw"). I was impressed by his perseverance and results! (I did have a larger knife and bowl for my own use, as well as a real spoon. Cowardly of me, I know.)
We both sat out on the driveway and carved our pumpkins. Isaac wasn't at all grossed out by the pumpkin guts, which was nice, because my girls have been known to be squeamish. He helped me get all the seeds out, too, without complaint. He did let me take over and finish up his pumpkin towards the end, and I was glad he did, because he was busily cutting it into rather small pieces, and the instructions I had said to cut the pumpkins in half to bake them.
While the notebooking journals are not required to use the textbook, they are a really nice addition to the program. First of all, all the pages are nicely spiral bound, which means children can't lose them. How many times have we started a binder, only to have papers spread about the house? I don't think I will tell you, actually, because that would be so embarrassing! There are also additional activities in the notebooking journals if your child is interested in pursuing the topics further. The activities are the same in both the junior and regular notebooks. Example: for Lesson 3, "Building Blocks of Creation," one of the suggested activities is to make a memory game out of the first 100 elements in the Periodic Table. You put the symbol on one card and the name on the other, and then try to match the symbols to the names. What a great idea! Mrs. Fullbright also includes book suggestions for each chapter for supplemental reading.
IXL.com is a website that offers math practice for PreK through 12th grade, and language arts for 2nd-4th grade (more to come). They are aligned with Common Core State Standards, as well as individual state standards, if you need that for your homeschool. We received a 1-year membership for the purpose of this review, and all three of my children used it: kindergarten, 7th grade and 8th grade.
As the parent, I received weekly progress reports for each student, showing both the amount of time they spent practicing and how well they were doing. I did like that the kids were practicing problems written in the same style they might see on their tests we do each year. They don't take the same end-of-grade tests used in public schools, but we do have to administer yearly tests in North Carolina, and sometimes they've struggled when questions are worded differently than they've seen in the curriculum we use. It's good for them to experience different ways of learning the same information.
The patterns are a great way to practice the skills you learn from the videos. The first pattern, Sport Shorts, is quite simple, and is a nice, quick project to get your feet wet and build confidence - simple seams, waistband with elastic, and hemming. Then, when you sew the crop top, you build on those skills with top stitching, and a garment that goes together in a really nifty way.
My 12 year old jumped right in and had a great time sewing. She is the one who would show me how things worked when I had an issue (usually from trying to figure things out without watching the video or reading the instructions carefully enough), and would say "No, Mom, it goes like this." My 13 year old was less excited about trying something new, and resisted a little, until she saw how easy it was. Once she completed her shorts, she was having a good time, and she loved how the crop top came together! It really is an ingenious pattern, but not difficult at all to sew.
