American Bison

Heading into November, we focused on animals we'll find here in America. The American Bison, often called buffalo, was our first choice. We love how they can stampede and how giant they are! There are a few at our local zoo that the kids have always been impressed by.

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Books! Books! Books!

This week, we learned about the American Bison. Author Sheila Griffin Llanas taught us how these massive mammals became known as "buffalo" here in America. They're the largest mammal in America and a respected icon.

Top 3 Bison books

Buffaloes (Animal Icons) by Sheila Griffin Llanas
1. Favorite Fact: Back in the 1600s, the French called bison les boeufs, meaning "oxen". English speakers pronounced this "la buff" which eventually became "buffalo". As such, here in America, they're colloquially known as Buffalo.
Bison by Quinn M. Arnold
1. This quick read is great for younger toddlers.
Bison by Melissa Gish
1. This book is more story-like but packed with facts. Good for older littles.

Create!

One thing we've learned is how thick their coat is toward their head and neck, especially. This week, we're doing another craft but with a fun sensory twist. Join us!

My dad drew these templates for the kids on a scrap box from our recycling.

I darkened the outline of my dad's sketch and we all worked to stretch out cotton balls. The cotton balls were not a sensory favorite but they did their best! Pulling them took a lot of patients and it was really tricky to keep them in one piece.

I mixed a tiny amount of water in with some Elmer's glue. The kid's used an old paint brush to ready the cardboard for our stretched out cotton balls to represent the bison's long thick fur. My little Picassos did the rest!

Get Moving!

We learned bison are ruminants. The word ruminant means to chew cud or to think deeply about something. When animals who are ruminants chew their cud, it's often said they appear to be ruminating. For our bison movement, we meditated! The kids grabbed their yoga mats, we asked Alexa to play kids mediation music and we sat crisscross apple sauce ruminating about our day. We also walked through an exercise of ruminating on what it might be like to be a bison in Yellowstone National Park.

Eats!

For eats this week, we chose ground bison and buffalo mozzarella burgers! It was in the cheese aisle at Whole Foods that I learned "buffalo mozzarella" really mean buffalo, as in water buffalo. Well, it's a learning experience for all of us, right?

We still bought the cheese because you can never have enough cheese, and what a fun new thing to try. On Eats day, I made small simple burger patties and we stuffed with mozzarella. This meat from Whole Foods was fantastic and very easy to work with; the burgers were a huge hit!

Summary

Top 5 Bison Facts

A bison's bellow can be heard up to 3 miles away. We loved this fact because it's similar to a lion's roar (and we love lions).
A male bison can be 6'5" tall and 10-12 feet heat to tail. That's as long as our living room rug!
Bison are ruminants. They have 4 stomach chambers. Their first lightly chewed food gets slightly digested in the first two chambers, regurgitated, chewed and chewed and chewed, and swallowed again for final digestion through the final two chambers. How neat!
Bison nearly went extinct back in the 1800s when English settlers moved west in America. Their population went from 50 million down to about 1,000. Conservation efforts for these gravely endangered animals have brought the population back up to about 20,000 today.
Bison have been in America since back when saber-toothed cats and mammoths roamed the continent. They've lived their current form for about 5,000 years.