Physical Science for Middle Grades

Not being a science person myself, I am always on the lookout for quality science materials well suited to a home school environment. I found a winner in the Basic Physical Science Note Pack from In the Hands of a Child. Pop over to Curriculum Choice to read my review!

Weekly Happenings: Ancient Egypt and Signs of Spring

This week we got back into the swing of things after two weeks of theater busy-ness. We still aren't up to top speed, but that will come. Next week.

Our inaugural days of participation in Project FeederWatch were Tuesday and Wednesday, our second foray into citizen science (the first being the GBBC). We saw 19 different species but not more than four of each species at a time. I also tried my hand at a chalk pastel rendering of a male bluebird! For tons of pastel inspiration, click the link at the right: A Simple Start in Chalk Pastels.

After lunch today (Friday), I made homemade oatmeal cookies and ate a lot of dough. I still feel slightly sick, but it's worth it.

We read about the Mosaic Map of Madaba and Machaerus, Herod's fortress in present-day Jordan, where John the Baptist was beheaded (website). Above, Miss Priss researches images of Machaerus. She found some neat cutaway and 3D pictures to share. Tiny Girl found us images of the mosaic on her laptop. I love it when the girls' interests are piqued and they conduct extra research on their own! Both links I've made take you to more photos and information.

We also worked on maps of Jordan. The girls have enjoyed our mapping exercises of the Holy Land. I download and print free blackline maps of each country. Then we consult our several atlases for mapping details.

I determined that our study of the ancients needed more of an Egyptian touch than AO Yr 6 scheduled, so I made some additions. Fortunately, the girls agreed (otherwise there would have been pushback -- ugh) since they've read and enjoyed Rick Riordan's Egyptian-themed novels. This week, both girls began Roger Lancelyn Green's Tales of Ancient Egypt, and Tiny Girl read The Golden Goblet, by Eloise Jarvis McGraw, a Newbery Honor book set in ancient Egypt. She gave it a big thumbs up. Miss Priss plans to read The Cat of Bubastes, by G.A. Henty. This title has a free Kindle edition and is also available on LibriVox, if you're looking for something to pass the hours on an upcoming car trip.

Piano recital pieces are coming along nicely. They are also working on other pieces as well. I love listening to them play! We build piano practice into our school day, and the girls' skills are really improving.

Signs of spring are everywhere. My daffodils have come and gone. The earlier azaleas are covered in buds, a few of which have already bloomed. The hydrangeas and rose bushes are leafing out, and the iris by the mailbox has sent out leaves. Ornamental pear trees are blooming everywhere (see my Weekly Happenings title photo) and so are Japanese magnolias. Ornamental cherries are covered in buds. Below are some photos I snapped during the week.

Lenten roses (hellebore) outside the historic sanctuary of my church.

Our tiny red azalea bush.

Flowering cherry trees in bud at a neighbor's house. These trees are glorious when in bloom.

I don't recall what kind of tree this is (at my church). It might be a dogwood. Time will tell.

Those are some glimpses of our week! How was your past week? Full of good stuff, I bet!

Happy weekend!

Link-ups:
Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers
HammockTracks
Homegrown Learners

Considering Dissection

I don't know about you, but I don't look back at my wet lab days with fondness. And, although I believe that dissection is part of a well-rounded education, I don't relish the thought of frog guts and formaldehyde all over my kitchen table. I'm strange that way.

Since I live in a larger metro area, I'm blessed to have at my disposal many homeschooling class and co-op opportunities, some of which offer science classes, including biology and dissection. This has been my plan until my friend, Eliza, introduced me to a great idea: digital dissection.

Before you raise your lip in derision, as I almost did, let me hasten to add that Eliza is a science person (degree and all that jazz), so she knows of what she speaks. She turned me on to The Digital Frog.

From the website:

• The Digital Frog 2.5 engages students with an interactive, virtual dissection, allowing the student to learn each of the cuts necessary by "cutting" with a digital scalpel before watching the full screen video. 
• Animations and interactions allow students to see how the frog's body works—from blood pumping through the heart, to joints that can be built up and moved by the user.
• The Digital Frog 2.5 is so much more effective than a wet lab because the interactive dissection is seamlessly linked to a comprehensive anatomy and physiology section, with human anatomy comparisons.
• A fascinating ecology section reminds students that biology is the study of living organisms.
• With context-sensitive definitions on every word and spoken pronunciations on significant words, students have all the information they need with just a mouse.
• The Digital Frog focuses the student on the study of structure and function, rather than on the process of dissection.
• The Digital Frog also encourages squeamish students who may otherwise avoid biology and science.

Well, that's enough to make me give The Digital Frog serious consideration. I have a squeamish student to think about, not to mention my reluctant self. And the cost is reasonable. The home version is $85 -- less than the in-person class in my area, especially since I'll save myself a one-hour round-trip drive every week!

Give The Digital Frog website a bit of your time. You may be convinced yourself!

"Owls" Project Pack: A Fantastic Study!

I've enjoyed a few lovely days off to celebrate Christmas and New Year's with my family and friends. I hope you had some rest and relaxation time as well. There's nothing like a cold, rainy Christmas Day that invites you to stay jammie-clad in front of a nice fire with a really good book, is there? Perfection!

I wasn't completely lax, however; I found time to write a review on a most wonderful resource: the Owls Project Pack from In the Hands of a Child. If you and yours love owls -- like we do! -- you'll thoroughly enjoy this. To read my complete review, pop over to Curriculum Choice.

And a happy and blessed 2013 to you!


Photo credit: Doug Greenberg / Foter / CC BY-NC-ND

Sir Isaac Newton Notebooking Page

Here's another notebooking page I created for our Secrets of the Universe: Objects in Motion (AO Year 6) study. Sir Isaac Newton features largely in this selection -- and quite rightly, too. I decided to keep this page more general in design for universal appeal. (No pun intended. I mean it.)

Sir Isaac Newton Notebooking Page


Speaking of Isaac Newton, the girls and I got a good feel for his life last year when we read the chapter about him in R.S. Ball's Great Astronomers (AO Year 5). He strikes me as one of those brilliant, weird types. His intelligence is stunning, and I'm glad he did what he did during his lifetime, but I wouldn't have wanted to sit next to him at a dinner party. And I'm quite sure the feeling would have been mutual. I suffer no illusions, believe me!

Two New Galileo Notebooking Pages

I've been messing about with creating a few notebooking pages for scientists we are studying in Paul Fleisher's series, Secrets of the Universe, which is a part of Ambleside Online's Year 6 curriculum. I've uploaded my latest two on Scribd.

This first is a generic page featuring a rendering of the man himself and two quotations.

Galileo Notebooking Page

The second page is more specific to Fleisher's Objects in Motion: Principles of Classical Mechanics. It highlights the Law of Pendulum Motion and the Law of Uniform Acceleration. I used the same rendering but a different quotation.

Galileo Notebooking Page: Two Laws

Why I chose the quotations I chose: I found it intriguing that Galileo, a devout Christian, often criticizes the Church in Rome in his writings for its stance against heliocentrism. For Galileo, one's firm and unyielding faith in God did not negate one's own God-given power of observation and reason.

I hope you find these useful!

Archimedes' Principle Notebooking Page

I just uploaded a one-page notebooking page for Archimedes' Principle. There's room for writing and a box for drawing a picture illustrating the principle (or whatever -- like Archimedes in his bathtub).

Archimedes' Principle Notebooking Page

Enjoy!

Johannes Kepler Notebooking Pages

The girls and I have been studying Kepler's three laws of planetary motion (read about that here). I created a two notebooking pages for my girls to use (a PDF document) and uploaded them to Scribd for anyone to use, free. Here's the link and a preview:

Johannes Kepler PDF Notebooking Pages

Hope this is helpful!

Weekly Happenings: Ponies, Planets, Books, Fish, Soup, and Purple Hair

We enjoyed some fabulous fall weather this week: cool evenings and pleasant, breezy days. To the left is a photo taken from my front door. The dark storm clouds brought us rain, and the rising sun from the east lit up the trees in the foreground.

I love this time of year. Spring has long been my favorite season -- a new awakening after the cold and grey of winter -- but autumn is a close second. I enjoy it more now than I did when I was younger. Perhaps it's because I'm no longer in the spring days of youth!

Most afternoons found us at the barn. Tiny Girl still rides Max, but she's also working hard training Tuli, her new "greenie." For the uninitiated (me, just a few years ago), a green pony is a young, little-trained pony requiring lots of work. Tiny Girl and I are learning a lot in these heretofore uncharted waters.

Here are Tiny and Tuli. Tiny Girl holds a longe (pronounced lunge) line, and they are working on Tuli's trot. Tuli tends to take a tiny step with her hind leg before she picks up a trot, a bad habit due to her being unfit (out of shape). To help her, Tiny Girl has Tuli walk several steps until her stride is nice and long; Tiny then raises her right arm and says, "Trot." Tuli trots a few steps and then Tiny has her slow back to a walk. And that's it! Only they repeat the practice for about 15 to 20 minutes.

One day, as I lounged in an Adirondack chair at the barn, I looked up and this (to the left) was my view: the sun shining through the still-green leaves of this magnificent oak tree.

On Monday afternoon, the girls both auditioned for their roles in their drama troupes' productions. Both were very glad when auditions were over!

Wednesday found us at church for the annual community fall festival. Miss Priss and her friends worked hard at the hair painting station (colored spray!); she still sports some purple in her locks. Wish I'd taken a photo....

Today, we are shopping for much-needed shoes and clothes. For some reason, my daughters continue to grow!

In our lessons this week, we are continuing to study Turkey with Explore the Holy Land. Johannes Kepler's three laws of planetary motion made their debut in our science studies, which fit perfectly with our It Couldn't Just Happen reading about the inner planets. I found simple explanations for each of Kepler's laws on the IYA2009 site. (The IYA stands for International Year of Astronomy, which was in -- wait for it -- 2009.) More detailed explanations and background -- but stll very easy to understand -- and drawings of both Kepler and Brahe can be found at NASA's Earth Observatory website.

I am especially fond of Kepler's third law: "The squares of the periods of the planets are proportional to the cubes of their semi-major axes."* Or, put another way: "The square of a planet's orbital period (the time taken to complete one orbit) is proportional to the cube of its average distance from the sun."**

Why am I fond of this particular law? To me, it illustrates both the elegance of mathematics and the orderliness of the universe. Chaos does not breed order (reference the law of entropy). Clearly (for me at least), this is the work of God's hands.

In our literature, Miss Priss is reading and loving Jack and Jill, by Louisa May Alcott, an AO free read for Year 6. I found a wonderful e-text on The Literature Network site, which is very easy to copy and paste in a word processing document. The ads do NOT copy! Miss Priss copied out a particularly lovely passage, which I thought I'd share with you:

So the fairy play woke the sleeping beauty that lies in all of us, and makes us lovely when we rouse it with a kiss of unselfish good-will, for, though the girls did not know it then, they had adorned themselves with pearls more precious than the waxen ones they decked their Princess in.

Tiny Girl is reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, by Mark Twain, and Lyddie, by Katherine Paterson. Both girls finished The Hobbit.

If you're interested in our complete plans for this school year, I wrote all about it in this post.

Last weekend, we enjoyed a sleepover at the Tennessee Aquarium with our Girl Scout troop (and three other troops in our service unit). It was a blast. We all enjoyed all the activities, especially the behind-the-scenes peeks. Our troop slept with the jellyfish watching over us.

 I'm writing a separate post about our visit to the aquarium. It's a great field trip idea if you live in the southeastern U.S.! I've visited several aquaria (!!) over the years, and this is one of my favorites for interest and diversity.

This week, we hit the jackpot with supper one night in an unexpected way. I'd purchased one of those bagged minestrone soup kits (I think it was Bear Creek?), and, while Tiny Girl and I were still at the barn, Himself threw it together. He thought it looked a bit sparse on the veggies, so he sliced up some carrots and added them in, along with more water than called for. He also added, per my instructions, some smoked pulled pork we had. Friends, it was too delicious for words. I'm so glad that soup weather is once more upon us!

Happy weekend!

I'm linking up with:
Weekly Wrap-Up @ Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers
Collage Friday @ HomeGrown Learners
Hammock Tracks
NOBH
Hip Homeschool Hop
Friday Favorite Things @ Finding Joy
Favorite Resources @ Learning All the Time

* Quoted from the Johannes Kepler website, www.johanneskepler.com
** Quoted from the IYA2009 website

Serendipitous Science

Thanks to Miss Priss, we had a bit of unplanned science fun yesterday. On Sunday evening, Tiny Girl found a mug of week-old coffee milk in the basement, left there by Miss Priss. The entire surface was covered with mold and a gelatinous substance.

Both girls gagged and wanted to toss the contents immediately; but I swiftly intervened. "Wait! Let's look at it under the microscope!"

Aside: In the interest of full disclosure, I must add that no one was as interested in this activity as much as I was. We did it anyway.

I was elected to lift the mold off the coffee surface and place it in a petri dish. (More disclosure: it smelled fairly gross.)

Our microscope is a 3D stereo model, and we got some really neat views of the growths. Unfortunately, I can't show you. You'll just have to imagine the awesomeness.

Tiny Girl held her breath while she viewed our sample. When she ran out of air, she'd run out of the kitchen, inhale deeply, and run back in to see more.

The girls were more impressed that they'd expected to be. The 3D effect made the white mold look like hills of snow, and we could really appreciate (if that's the right word to use) the gooey gelatinous look of the oozy substance.

But I was still the most excited about the whole thing.

So if your kids leave plates of food or cups of drinks sitting around forgotten, capitalize on the opportunity for an impromptu science lesson. As an added benefit, your children may never forget their plates or cups again. I'm certain the experience made an impression on Miss Priss!