Hatta Trip

We drove through Oman again and went to Hatta, which is in the U.A.E., but is accessed by going through Oman. We have to bring our passports and go through the border crossing. Prior to 2007 it was an open border, but they are making efforts to tighten up the borders.

We started with the intent of finding desert animals. We did see a number of animals, goats, camels, a donkey, a lizard and some bugs. We made several stops in the mountains to examine the different types of rocks and rock formations there. We took a number of pictures and Kyle could blog on a number of features of the geology of the area.

For now I had him do a post on natural resources. He just learned about the way we use natural resources in school. He uses the Harcourt series for Grade 2 and they are on the Earth Science chapter. The trip was a good opportunity to bring the text to life. I had Kyle look at how natural resources were used in buildings and walls. Most things here are made from concrete, but we saw some nice walls that were made from the rocks found in the area. We also got lucky and spotted a concrete block making "factory." It was a small company and they let us walk around to see how the blocks are made. They didn't speak English so I had to figure out the process myself, which was not difficult to deduce given the materials (the cement, rocks, water, sand and ash) were in plain sight and the machines were simple molds and mixers.


Kyle did the post (Natural Resources) two days after the trip. He worked on it by himself. Once he was finished, I had him read it aloud a few times. While reading he caught several mistakes with missing articles, capitalization and word spacing. I helped him with one mistake that he has made before. He misspells "from" as "form." The spell checker doesn't underline it and he reads right through it.

Other possible post from this trip: Desert Animals and Erosion.

We have two things to do this week. We will see Ambassador Satch, a musical portrait of Louis Armstrong, at UAE University and we will go to the Al Ain Zoo. The Al Ain Zoo has 3 new white rhinos. The children are really excited to see them, so I will take them after school one day this week.

Geology Trip

We live near the border of Oman and went for a drive through the mountains there. The drive was not initially intended to be a field trip, but I did ask Kyle to bring some books along. He brought a Rock and Fossil book and a Geography book. During the drive we decided to make the trip a geology outing. We stopped along the way several times to analyze the rock formations. We stopped at an old coral reef, now high and dry, that has a number of fossils. We didn't go on a full fossil hunt, but just photographed the old reefs and looked at the structure. We then stopped at an interesting outcropping with clearly defined vertical layers. We climbed around it some before getting back on the road. Our next stop was a wadi, a dry river bed. The walls of the wadi are over twenty feet high and are a good example of water erosion. We also found some nice smooth rocks to contrast nicely with the jagged rocks we usually find in the mountains.

Our drive took us up into the mountains and it became difficult to stop, but along the way we talked about the different formations we saw. It would have been nice to have a real geologist on the trip with us, as my knowledge of geology is limited to Geology I twenty years ago. The drive through the mountains is pleasant. They are now paving what used to be an off-road route. This makes the trip easier, but opens the mountains up to more tourist and more traffic. As a reward for Kyle's hard work, we ate at the hotel in Hatta, the town at the end of the mountain road.

Kyle created a photo slide show of our trip. He choose the photos (with some input from me, or every picture would have him in it) and added transitions between the photos.

Note: It took Kyle a few months to complete this post. The writing has been slow going, but now he is more motivated. The post does not include the slide show. Writing next to a picture seems to work better. It gives him a static visual reference for his writing.

Al Ain Zoo: Mammals and Continents

Kyle's Report

Trip: Our local zoo

Goal: See how many different mammals we could find for each continent

Materials:
1. Graph with all 7 continents listed on the vertical axis
2. Graph with some of the mammals we expected to see at the zoo on the vertical axis and the 7 continents on the horizontal axis.

Process:
1. Find the mammals.
2. Read the distribution data for the mammals to see which continent they live on.
3. Add information to the graphs.

Blog:
1. Use online graph making tool to design the graph.
2. Write a paragraph on the data.

Questions to Guide Kyle in Writing a Paragraph:
Where did we go?
What type of animals did we research?
Which continents had the most mammals?
Which continent had the least mammals?
Which mammal lived on the most continents? Where did it live?

Skills & Knowledge Areas: Classification of Animals, Graphs, Addition, Geography, Reading (Scanning), Technology, Writing

Comments: The animal placards contained detailed information on animal distribution, so Kyle had to know that the Sahara was in Africa or that Sri Lanka was in Asia to get the information he needed. Surprisingly, he needed little help handling this.