Adventures in Homeschooling (Part 1: Chameleons)

I have always said that I wouldn't choose to homeschool if I didn't have to, and that remains true.  But there are so many things I appreciate about homeschooling, and I am so thankful to have the privilege of teaching our boys at home and all the blessings that come with it.

One of the greatest blessings of homeschooling is being able to stop everything whenever something cooler comes along.

A couple weeks ago, something cooler definitely came along.

One of the gardeners in the compound knew that we were on the lookout for chameleons and hadn't found one yet.  Well, he found one in the midst of his gardening duties and brought this beauty to us.  It was the biggest chameleon we'd ever seen!

We did not have chameleons this big at Tenwek and it was the source of much joy for our household!  The boys named it Jade, which is one of the better names they've ever come up with for a creature :)

Because of all the excitement, we completely abandoned our work at the table and decided to build the chameleon a terrarium, stat.  I pulled out one of our many empty bins so the kids could make a habitat for our new friend.  Oh, and of course we ran to tell our friends/neighbors so they could join us in the fun!

Can you see Jade in there?

As soon as the terrarium was complete, talk turned to what to feed her.  I sent the kids on a mission to find crickets and grasshoppers, which they dutifully did.  (If these kids had a superpower, it'd be finding and catching bugs...honestly, they are really good at that!)  And then Caleb had the idea of feeding their pet mantis to the chameleon.  He'd caught the praying mantis a couple days prior but it wasn't eating much and wasn't looking good and I had planned to release it...until the chameleon came along and the kids wanted to see what would happen if the mantis was thrown to the lions, as it were.

Since it seemed obvious that Jade was hungry, the kids immediately took off again to find more bugs for her.  In the midst of searching, one of the girls found another chameleon!  It had black spots all over, which we'd never seen in a chameleon before.  It was smaller and had a slightly different shape than Jade.  My friend Lauren started looking up chameleon species, and we determined that the second chameleon was a flap-necked chameleon, as opposed to a Jackson's chameleon (which was Jade's species).  Lots of fun learning was happening!

Of course we added the second chameleon (aptly named Black Spot by the children) to the terrarium.  And then Lauren and I decided to have a picnic lunch and chameleon story time as we observed our new reptilian friends.  It was so much fun!

Can you spy both chameleons?  They're both in there somewhere...

As we watched them, we started noticing that Black Spot would get a bit aggressive and stick out her throat pouch when angry.  The throat pouch had beautiful red stripes on it and would only come out whenever Jade got too close, or a kid tried to grab her.  Can't say I blame her for being a bit tense with seven little people excitedly jumping around!

And then Black Spot got really angry.  Jade, the curious sort, kept testing her boundaries with Black Spot and invaded her personal space a number of times.  I happened to be filming during the first antagonistic encounter between the two.  Black Spot was cranky!

We kept the chameleons for the rest of the afternoon, then released them in the evening.  In the morning we could still find Black Spot hiding in the bushes, right where we'd left her.  It was quite a day of homeschool.  Science class: check!

AND THEN!  A week later, the kids were playing in the yard across from our house, and someone noticed a chameleon digging in the dirt.

It was Black Spot!!!  And a chameleon digging in the dirt can only mean one thing: she was digging a burrow to lay her eggs.  It's true!  She was pregnant and bulging at the sides and digging digging digging, slowly slowly slowly, down deep to lay those eggs.  (And no wonder she was so cranky before!  Lauren and I completely sympathized with the poor lady who just wanted her space when she was in the last days of pregnancy).

It was fascinating!  We were all excited to watch the process.  But we were also concerned.  Her location was out in the open, in plain sight of cats and birds and other predators.  We were worried about Black Spot herself, but also worried about the baby chameleons whenever they would hatch and come out and potentially get gobbled up by any number of things.  

So...we dug them up.

I know it sounds a bit ridiculous, but that's what we did.  Besides, this event became another science class and we wanted to know how deep down she'd dug and how many eggs she laid.  Turns out she dug way deeper than we thought and laid 26 eggs!

It was incredible.  Lauren got online and found out how to take care of chameleon eggs.  Apparently plenty of people have done this before, and in the name of science and homeschooling we decided to try it too.  We split the batch of eggs in half so we could keep some and the Webbers could keep some.  And in case some don't survive, maybe the other half will.  At any rate, it's an ongoing science experiment.  Chameleon eggs don't hatch for 4-7 months, however, which is a significantly longer incubation period than we expected, so we'll have to wait quite awhile to see what happens.

Like I said, one of the greatest blessings of homeschooling is being able to stop everything whenever something cooler comes along.  And we've had some amazingly cool things come along.  And the kids have learned a ton, had so much fun, talked about it for days, and will always remember this.