Turtles/Tortoises

This week we were a little stumped on what to do for "school." That is, until we got to meet this little lady on Sunday.
My parents were walking up on the Red Hill, and saw her. They called us to see if we wanted to come see, so I took the kids and headed on over. By the time my parents had called us, and we drove back up to where they had seen her, she had traveled a bit...so Hannah got to help Grandpa and Marcie "track" her for a while. They found her pretty quickly, and we all got to look (but not touch) until she started acting a little worried. So we let her alone.

On the way home in the car, Seth suggested that we learn about tortoises and turtles for school this week. So we did. Incidental learning at its finest!

What they already knew:
Hannah: They have hard shells. The turtles have flippers and tortoises have legs. They go up on land to lay their eggs and they cover them up with sand so that other animals won't get their eggs. You can know how old they are by looking at the rings on their shells.

Seth: Tortoises can't swim and turtles can. They can put their heads into their shells. They have a hard shell so their predators don't eat them. Some are both water and land livers. The turtles in the water have fins for swimming and the tortoises have claws for land. (I think he meant flippers, not fins, but whatev!)

There was so much to learn about turtles that I tried to make it more concise by taking a few facts, and writing them on a picture of a turtle. Then I took another copy of the drawing and colored it, and cut out little parts of it like a puzzle. Then they took turns pulling off the little pieces and revealing new facts. I used the books from the library to illustrate some of the points better. We learned how to tell the difference between a turtle and a tortoise. We learned how to tell if it was a boy tortoise or a girl. We examined an actual tortoise shell that had been found in the desert a long time ago. And we looked at the pictures of our little tortoise friend from earlier in the week. We were able to tell that the shell we were looking at was a boy, and the tortoise we had seen Sunday was a girl. The kids thought that was pretty cool. We discussed their life cycle and life expectancy. We talked about reptiles, being cold-blooded, and how to keep cool/warm when they needed to. We talked about diets; and, of course, speed.

When we were done with that, they each got to make their own tortoise "puzzle" and they enjoyed coloring the pieces of the shell. They insisted on my rewriting all the fact onto their tortoises as well.
What they know now:
Seth: The boys have a gular horn that points up, and the girls is flat. They lay their eggs and dig a hole and cover it. They dig burrows and hybernate. Tortoises eat cactuses for water. Some are so big that you could ride on them.
Hannah: You can tell the difference between the girls and boys by looking at their tails, their horns, and their shells. Girl tortoises pee on the ground to make it softer for digging their egg holes. They don't have as many bones as humans. The plates on their shells are called scutes.

Next Week: Fossils.