One thing we love to do at our homeschool is Hands-On Science! I feel our children learn best when they can actually use their senses to hypothesize and make observations. Using their hands to feel and manipulate materials, their eyes to see up closely, their ears to listen and observe and their nose to help in the process.

On top of that they love to get dirty and dig up all kinds of things. I’ll admit I too used to be as adventurous as they are when I was younger. As I got older and really understood things like bugs do bite and some make you itch etc. my interest in exploring grew less and less. One of the beauties of homeschooling is that my children are helping to spark up that interest again and bring back out the explorer in me :)

We went outside this weekend and the kids discovered a colony of Rollie pollies. When you are just looking on the surface of things you don’t see as much but when you look deeper beyond the surface a whole other world exists. Since my kids like to go deeper they began to dig around the area where they saw a few Rollie’s...

and hidden world was revealed. My sons started asking me questions like what do they like to eat and how much water do they drink? Do they like the mud more than the grass? So, we decided to do a little experiment. We got out some buckets and put wet mud in one and damp grass in the other. We also put drops of water in each but that didn’t seem to excite them at all. We noticed that the Rollie’s tended to gather together more and flock around the mud pile whereas with the grass they tended to keep scattering...

Afterwards we read an article that shared

They tend to make their homes in wooded areas, particularly where there are plenty of damp leaves and other decaying vegetation, where food can easily be found. They can also be found living in piles of compost and areas containing mulch.

What I thought was really interesting is that Rollie pollies are decomposers! They eat dead materials from plants and animals and then return those nutrients back into the earth. Great for gardeners/homesteaders to know!

If you would choose to keep them as pets they would eat fresh fruits and vegetables such as lettuce and apple skins.

It’s so much fun to learn hands-on! My kids get so excited about their little experiments. Now they know a little more about their friendly crawly buddies. Once we are done exploring with nature we always place it back where it belongs :)

Oh and before we went back inside we got a visit from this fuzzy guy...sorry for the blur but he was moving so fast...

Eeeeeeeeeek! 😬

All photos are my own and were taken with our Cannon EOS Rebel T6.

Thanks for Exploring with us! 🌿

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