Science

This is just a fun video of the boys doing an experiment from the Young Explorer Series Exploring Creation with Zoology 1 book.

If you are curious about the experiment, I guess, you’ll have to get the book.

The first lesson of the Exploring Creation with Botany is all about taxonomy. This seemed like a difficult concept for young children to understand, but fortunately a couple of pictures in the book spurred my kids on. My daughter set up a chart with the taxonomy of her closest. For example kingdom: shirts phylum: short-sleeve order: button-up. She had fun with this.

JD Boy classified G’tums’ Duplo blocks.

So what I thought would be quite a boring subject for my youngsters turned into quite a fun activity and even my three-year old enjoyed joining in. I have to say this gave me a good first impression of the Botany book. When something dry is turned into fun, my children giggle and I smile.

The next day after they learned the concept of taxonomy, they enjoyed learning about the first two terms: vascular and non-vascular. But they got a bit bogged down the following day when we hit angiosperm, gymnosperm, Anthophyta, Bryophyta, etc. Maybe I went too fast on that part. Maybe if we’d done one term per sitting/day and a nature walk to find that kind of plant, then maybe all would have been well. But we did four terms and then went for a nature walk to find them and they were getting confused which "phyta" was which. By the time we were done with this lesson, my daughter was hanging upside down on her chair saying "This is boring." Oh no, I hope I didn’t strike out.

The kids did enjoy finding the things that we had read about. Here are the things that they found. We’re only going to name the phylum, not the plant, since that is what we were studying.

Anthophyta: all flowering plants.

Coniferophtya: all cone producing plants.

I don’t know if that cone belonged to that tree. Zippy just thought they made a nice picture together.

Pteraphyta: Seedless vascular plants–ferns.

A shot of the spores on the fern (and my personal favorite shot of the day.)

Bryophyta: moss

We’ve been busy making entries in the Botany Notebooking Journal, while we’ve been studying.

Left is JD Boy’s dried leaf and his moss drawing. Right is Zippy’s drawings for angiosperm and gymnosperm.

Next we’re off to plant some seeds. I’ll keep you posted.

My kids have been wanting to do this project ever since we studied about the Human Body in January and February. We moved on to other things, so I thought maybe we would forget it; but they kept reminding me, so we did it. It doesn’t necessarily tie in with anything we are studying right now, but it was fun anyway. Even I thought it was fun. And it was a great review to see how much they (and I) remembered from our studies a few months ago.

I traced the kids’ bodies out on butcher paper and cut them out, then we printed the organs and body parts out on construction paper and cut them out and attached them with brads and with glue. All of the body parts were printed from the My Body book.

“See what the inside of me looks like!”

We love being able to really study what interests us. That is one of the blessings of being able to homeschool. Today we have been studying about the respiratory system. That goes well with our last study about the circulatory system.

For this one we didn’t find any Moody videos just on this topic, but we enjoyed watching Wonders of God’s Creation: Human Life and remembering how amazing the human machine really is. We also didn’t find any amazing 3-D models online this time, but we did get to do a couple of really fun experiments.

For the first one, we lit a candle and then put it under a jar and waited to see what would happen. The kids thought that it was going to explode in their face. It didn’t. The candle just burned out. We did that over and over, because everybody needed a turn to blow out the match. Then Zippy breathed into the jar several times before capping the burning candle. This time, the flame went out instantly. Next we took our jar outside, to make sure it was full of oxygen again then we repeated the first experiment until the flame started to diminish on the candle, at which point we removed the jar. The flame returned to it’s full size immediately. We repeated that one several times as well. The moral is that fire needs oxygen–just like us.

Candle burning.

Candle burned-out.

The second experiment that we did was to see how the lungs expand when the chest cavity expands. You can see this apparatus that we have to demonstrate this. If you press on the bottom of the apparatus all of the air in the balloons is forced out through the straw. If you put a little tape on the rubber that is on the bottom of the jar so that you can pull slightly, you will fill the balloons with a little air.

Left: By doing nothing the balloons are filled with a little air. Right: By pressing on the bottom, the air is forced out of the balloons.

And then we have one more of our health songs from the Janice’s Attic Songs for Kids CD. Only problem is that G’tums was jumping all over, so this is just part of it.

We are in the process of learning about the most wonderful piece of machinery ever made–the human body. I’m not going to share every single thing that we’ve studied, but I want to share with you the part that we just finished–our heart and our circulatory system. We should all take some time to learn about our hearts and how to keep them healthy, after all the Bible says: "For the life of the flesh is in the blood." Leviticus 17:11.

We found some fun resources for studying about our circulation. We watched a very good DVD: "Red River of Life" from the Moody Science Classics. It was made a long time ago, but it truly is a classic. We watched it several times and every time were amazed by the things we learned. On it We got to watch a real heart being pumped and see how the blood rushes in and out. We love the Moody Science Videos. We always learn amazing things when we watch them.

We found a couple of really neat websites from wikipedia. The first one, The Virtual Heart, has a 3-D model that you can manipulate. You can twist it any direction you want and you can even take it apart so that you can learn the different parts of the heart as pieces and learn their names. The second one, National Heart Lung and Blood Institute, has an animation where you can see how the blood is pumped through the heart. It is a simple diagram and easy to understand even for young minds. If you have a few minutes to just learn a little about how your heart works, I highly recommend taking a look at those two sites. They’re just really great.

Nothing excites my children like hands-on activities. Their favorite for the study of the heart was using a stethoscope. First they listened to my heart to see if I was alive. They weren’t sure. Then they listened to themselves. They were definitely alive! (Maybe because they weren’t wearing heavy sweaters.) Then they submitted the puppy to a thorough heart examine. She had to roll over and let each one of them, even the toddler, listen to her heart. She’s alive too!

We also found a few fun songs about the heart. Two of them were from a CD called Janice’s Attic Songs for Kids. This CD has several health related songs as well as songs about obedience, thoughtfulness, dependability and many more important characteristics that we all want to teach our children. Here is a video of the kids  singing along with the CD.