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Science
Goals
Our goals for our kids'
science learning are: for them to be curious about the
world, to enjoy the beauty of its organization and
design, to understand the basics facts of science, and
to know how to think analytically and critically about
what they've observed.
Because observation is a key part of science, we've put
a premium on hands-on learning, direct observation
(including drawing), and the making and testing of
educated guesses and hypotheses.
Resources
My favorite purchase this
past year has been a microscope from
GreatScopes.com. The main caveat is that it
often takes a bit of tweaking to know how to adjust the
light and the proper focusing distance, but the view has
been just beautiful and our kids have been caught up in
the wonder of small detail or microscopic things.
From a few years ago, we also have an
Intel QX3
(we bought it for $30) that hooks up to the microscope
and allows you to film larger events like a dehydrating
strawberry (time lapse photography) or how a roly poly
climbs over a stick.
This past year, we mainly covered biology - using a used
middle school spine book for our daughter and assigned
text for our son from his course at Regina Coeli. Our
daughter loves animal magazines like Ranger Rick or Wild
Bird, and watches Jeff Corwin videos from the library.
She also plays the computer game
Zoo Vets which provide
a fair amount of veterinary medicine problem solving.
We also have a subscription to
unitedstreaming.com,
which gives us downloadable moves (with closed
captioning, teachers notes, and student activities and
quizzes) that are particularly strong for science.
Because we were doing biology this past year, we also
did some dissections (books and kits from
Home Science Tools) and
modeling building with kits like the
Visible Horse (see
below).
Science at Home
 Protozoa:
One absolute delight is
growing up protozoa. Ideally, it good to have a rich
pond water to draw
from, but we were also testing the
effect of different food sources
on protozoa species.
The pond water we had plenty of
wiggley things swimming in it -
Click here to see a little movie shot on our digital
camera
here.
We divided the water equally into little glass jars -
and added either nothing (our control), grass from the
side of the pond, rice, dirt, and a cooked egg. We let
the culture grow (cap off, covered by foil) away from
direct sunlight, and then we looked a the different
protozoa by day 5.
Mitoses:
 Here
are some of our
drawings of the different stages of mitosis based on the
stained slide sets we bought from Hometraining tools. It
was a little tricky taking a picture through the
microscope, but if I held it far above the eyepiece, I
could usually find a spot where the picture could come
into focus.
We told the kids that medical labs count the number of
cells actively undergoing mitosis in order to estimate
how aggressive a tumor is. A rapidly dividing tumor will
have lots of mitoses and it will also grow quickly.
DNA: Here's our
DNA extraction from split peas. It was pretty easy.
The short recipe is: blend 1/2 cup split peas, 1/3 tsp
salt, 1 cup of water. Collect the green soupy part. Add
2 Tbsp dish soap to break membranes. Add 1/4 tsp
Adolph's meat tenderizer and gently mix to digest
proteins. Add an equal amount of rubbing alcohol and
then I put in the freezer for maybe 20-30 minutes. The
white stuff is the DNA! A nice site with more details is
here.
We found this DNA origami model template
here, and also watched
The Race for the Double Helix
which is one of the most realistic portrayals of the
process of scientific investigation I've seen. We highly
recommend it. The only problem is, it's hard to find.
Check your public library. We were patient and
eventually found a reasonably priced on on Ebay.
Pictures from our son's fungi, mold, and yeast study: what we
liked about these activities is that they encouraged him
to look more closely when he was going out of walks in
our backyard. He looked at the different structure of
fungi and compared them macroscopically as well as
microscopically.
The other pictures below were from our grasshopper
study. We looked at
the differences between the leg designs of the
grasshopper, kangaroo, and man. The grasshopper and
kangaroo have knees that point backward, giving them
more jump. The other pictures (small) are from
The Robot Zoo Grasshopper
and a 'B'
Movie Site that has short video from a campy
sci-fi film that has grasshoppers taking over the earth.
In the picture at the bottom, our $30 Intel microscope
was able to show us the individual ommatidia that make
up the eye.
 
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