Tuesday, April 3, 2012

The Journey: Stories of Migration

This week's book, The Journey: Stories of Migration, compares migration of locusts and whales. While the excerpt in our book doesn't cover butterflies, we learn about them in science class. I am about to send away for our larvae so that we can begin to study their life cycle after spring break! We will be using the Journey North website.


If you are looking for companion books, check out The Story of Three Whales. It's a story we used to read when I used Open Court for second grade.

 It is about three whales who, in an unusually warm winter, missed the signs that winter was coming (probably due to global warming) and it was necessary to migrate south to a warmer climate. They got trapped in ice, and by some miracle, two whales survived after some human intervention and help from an ice breaking ship.

We watched this whale echolocation video to learn more about how whales communicate and find a sense of direction on their long journey.

We also learned about locust plagues. BBC created this great video about The Plagues of Locusts in Africa.