We learned about the skeleton system and why it's so important. While I read, the kids made bodies out of clay, showing that it's impossible for a body to stand up without bones....okay, well, Eli proved me wrong when he constructed clay feet, but he broke the rules.
After Colin finished his person, he made snowmen with "bones".
We finished our science study of sea creatures and moved on to human anatomy and physiology this past week. We're using Apologia again and I am still really enjoying these books. The kids were super excited to start this new study when they saw the bag I came home with from the dollar store. What I love most about this book is that it plans out easy activities that are doable, fun and engaging...and that all 3 of the kids can participate in. We learned about cells this week and made a jello mold of a cell. The jello was the cytoplasm and then different candies represented different organelles we learned about it.
In theory, we were supposed to flip the bowl upside down (so the jello was free standing and not sitting in the bowl), but that part was a fail, so we just left it in. The funniest part of it all, was how Eli dug in and ate it in the end.
You can also see in the background how much Maya loves our "symposium" time. That day, I was freezing, so we did our reading by the fireplace. Maya thought it was just the right spot to take a nap when we were done.
We're less than 2 weeks into school and I am already LOVING Apologia science...and regretting not finding this sooner. I found Sonlight's (what we have used up until now) lessons to be all over the place and the activities were extremely complicated with little explanation as to why you were doing the activity, thus we didn't do very many.
Night and day difference here. It's so well written that my 6th, 3rd and 1st grader can all learn it at the same time and participate in the experiments. You just read a couple of pages and then it will give you an easy activity to do with an explanation. It also has an activity book that is probably most appropriate for the 3rd grade, but I am able to make it work for all of them. This week, we just picked one page with a corresponding Bible verse on it and they colored it while I read. At the end of the week, whoever had the verse memorized got a little treat.
Most of all, I've been excited that the activities are actually doable!
We learned about volume, matter and density and did an experiment with an egg.
Will it sink or float in water and salt water?
And buoyancy.
They were supposed to craft a boat out of foil and pretend they are pirates who have captured a ship and need to bring the treasure onto their ship. They estimated how many pennies (the treasure) their ship could hold and then tested their hypothesis.
I did an experiment for a science fair about how different ingredients work in a cupcake. It took about two weeks to complete. I had to pick which ingredients to take out and then make different batches.
