Homeschool sex ed: The birds, the bees, and now the fish
May 1st, 2008, 6:03 am · 3 Comments · posted by learningathome
Life in the country provides us with a lot of opportunities to study the life cycle. First, we had spring chickens and roosters gone wild.
Then we signed up to count bees as part of The Great Sunflower Project.
Last week, in a moment of temporary insanity, I took 6 kids to a pet store and came out with 6 fish, 2 crabs, 3 live plants, a couple of snails, and a cute little frog who met an untimely end.
Next morning, I was sleeping peacefully when my girls rushed in, insisting that there were new fish in the tank. Baby fish. “Fish don’t have babies,” I said. I rolled over and tried to go back to sleep. The girls started fighting over whether the baby fish were brown or red or yellow or blue. I finally gave up on sleeping and went to go look at the imaginary fish.
We counted 4 babies.
We then decided to launch a rescue effort since the crabs and a couple of the bigger fish looked like they were trying to make appetizers out of the babies. After removing all the plants and getting the net in there, Brian pulled out 13 baby fish. Some were brown, some blue, some yellow, and some kind of red, so all those who argued were correct.
We’re going to need a new tank. I think this time, I’ll shop alone.
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Contacting Rose Godfrey
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LOL- reading your post got me laughing at how much we had in common with a few things. We are doing the great sunflower project too, in fact, we just planted our seeds today!
In the past, we raised chickens, including hatching the eggs in the kids hands. We also raised butterflies from larva, hermit crabs, etc. We still own pond fish (called Sarosa’s, they are fancy goldfish but much cleaner than koi), they have reproduced for us. We also have a few pond snails, and wild frogs that call our pond home. We even had a big painter turtle visit our pond not too long ago, we were worried he would harm the baby fish, so we took him to the lake.
My kids have also watched and helped our dog give birth.
Homeschooling is amazing because when we learn about reproduction, it is more than just …..well you know.
Oh, yeah, life in the country teaches you a lot! Years ago a little girl asked a friend of mine if she had kids. She said she was “too young” (at 25) hoping to dodge the subject. The kid looked at her and said, “You’re not too young, you just haven’t been bred yet.” Gotta love those farm kids.