Science Sunday :: The Respiratory System

This is by far the best picture from the day...W displaced a lot of water with his air, the most out of everyone.

Not only did I fall behind in blogging about our science adventures with our friends I realized I haven't even taken pictures the last couple of meetings. So now I am caught up. This past week we met to do our chapter on the respiratory system. We are using Apologia's Exploring Creation Human Anatomy which I am loving.

I had fallen behind in my schedule of reading (I'm noticing a pattern of falling behind in things...anyone else notice that?) and at home study that we should have done prior to our meeting but luckily the U family had also had a crazy couple weeks leading up to Thanksgiving and a family trip over 5 hours away and they hadn't even opened the book! Yea! No one knew what we were talking about!

We made the mini books and added to our personal person in our notebook. Then we did an experiment about lung capacity. Luckily I had tried out the experiment before everyone got together so I used a bigger bowl than I had originally planned and had a towel underneath the whole thing! The kids enjoyed the experiment and after we were all done wanted to do it again but this time after they had run laps around the house...to see if exercise changed how much they could blow out.

A fun day!

Science Sunday :: Skeleton

Oh...I'm far behind on our science posts. Well, from where we left off.

Week 2 of our Science Meet-ups was at our house. My friend had gotten chapter 1, cells, and had a great snack/craft. How was I going to come up with something cool like that? My friend suggested the halloween deptartment.

And was she right! My Family Fun magazine had just come and when I flipped through that I had all the ideas I needed to complement the lesson from the book!

The first thing we did came from the book. I had cooked some chicken wings ahead of time. The kids donned rubber gloves to take the meat off and pull apart the bones. We looked at the similarities between our arm bones and a chickens. We found the tendons, the cartilage and muscle. We broke a bone in half and found the marrow. The kids thought this was completely disgusting but we did learn a lot. We took some bones and placed them in a jar a vinegar and a jar of water so we could see what acid does to bone.

After we washed our hands and cleaned up the chicken stuff we got our bone snacks. This is one of the things I found in the magazine. Mini marshmallows stuck on to the ends of a pretzel stick then dipped in white chocolate. Yummy! They were more difficult to make than I anticipated...that white chocolate is a little bit of a bear. So everyone only got a couple of "bones".

Lastly, we made our own "skele-toni". Another Family Fun find. I bought a LOT of different pastas. I separated what each kid would need into a baggie then we went head down to create a fun little pasta skeleton. Both our friends and ourselves still have our cute skele-toni creations up. They turned out so awesome!

Science :: Cells

We are all excited about science in the World of Wiedz this year. Last year was not such a great year in science. My little students wanted more than I was prepared to give them. I like to think that since it was our first year, I was just keeping my head above water with the homeschool stuff so science suffered. This year though is different...real cirrculum different...a plan different. And it is going really well.

This year we are doing two things differently. One, we are using Apologia Anatomy and Physiology as our cirrculum. Wow! This is my first experience with Apologia and they are not messing around. Now we are only one chapter in but I have to say that the information is great, age-appropriate, engaging, and interesting. I went ahead and got the notebooking books for each of my "school-aged" kids, getting the "junior"version for my kinder. They really love them!

The next new thing we are doing is that we have joined forces with our friends, the U's. Each family is working on the same chapter for about 2 weeks. During the second week we are meeting (alternating houses) and doing some of the "funner" experiments and the bigger notebooking activities. All the kids are thrilled with this aspect of our science since they all love the children in the U family.

This past Tuesday was our first get together.

We made our "personal persons".

We did a notebooking activity, the cell wheel. My kids had already done the part of the chapter that talks about each organella of the cell so this was good reinforcement and the U kids hadn't gotten to that part yet so this was a good introduction to the unit...isn't it great how that works out?

And to top it off, Mrs. U had all the supplies for each child to make their own edible cell. Anyone say sugar shock?

I've never seen #4 sit through a school lesson that was a little over his head so well before and he loved the edible cell part - almost as much as the epic lightsaber battle in the yard afterward.

Science Sunday: Science Factory

If there is one thing I've "failed" at this year, it would be science. We started ok with an animal unit. Reading about a different family of animals each week, getting support books from the library, making a narration page, coloring a picture (can I just say how awesome goggle is...just add "coloring pages" to anything and you get so much!), and adding a miniture picture to our animal classification poster. After 12 weeks or so though we were ready to be done.

I had plans to do an anatomy unit next and a garden/nature unit this spring. Then my friend and I decided to do anatomy next year with Apologia, kind of co-op style. I'm excited about the Apologia books, I think it will be a great science and I know my kids will enjoy meeting with their friends to do the work. But instead of skipping only the anatomy section of my plan...I kind of let the whole science thing slide.

The thing is...my kids LOVE science. Each week they would beg for it. They missed it. And I felt guilty that they had no science.

So I've been trying to work it back in. I've used some of the plans I already had for the nature/garden unit, and we're planning on a science fair #1 is putting together (more on that later), and to fill in I found a Girl Scout badge with lots of science experiements we're working through.

I'm going to use Sundays to record our science adventures. First up, The Science Factory.

The Science Factory is a local hands-on museum-like place. Mr. Wiedz's Aunt and Uncle got our family a membership for Christmas and a few weeks ago I took the kids for the morning. We had a fun morning and can't wait to go back.