Looking Things Up

On Thursday, after swimming lessons, we met with some friends at the park. One of our friends (Miss P. 5yr) had a scavenger hunt activity sheet of plants and animals that you might find at or near your house in Wellington. I had a look through it and there were many common things that we recognised and discussed, such as tui, cats, blackbirds, weta (which S.'s cat, Minty, likes to hunt), sparrows, harakeke, and white tailed spiders. We asked A. if he had white tailed spiders at home. He said "I've never seen a white tailed spider... only black-headed jumping spiders".

Black-headed jumping spider

About a week ago A. found a spider on the ceiling of his bedroom and asked me what it was. I have recently been fearing that I give him too many straight answers, and not enough strategies for finding things out, so I said "Ooh! we could look it up!" and grabbed a book on NZ insects from the shelf. He flicked through the book and located the picture of the spider, and I read out the name to him. I now understand what a boon having a half decent home library is and how blessed I was growing up in a home with great books in the time preceding the internet.

About two weeks ago I was reading Snugglepot and Cuddlepie and there was an illustration of some scary deep-sea fish. A. and S. have been fascinated by the scary teeth and glowing lights of things like the angler fish (like in the movie Finding Nemo) and they wanted to know what types of fish they were looking at so I used a Google image search for "deep sea fish" to find the one that looked right. It turns out that it was a viperfish. At the moment internet searches must appear as magic to my children, but over time I hope they will learn a lot about finding the information they want. Now we have a couple of books on strange and interesting fish from the local library.