MOVING ONTO EARTH....

We moved onto the study of the earth in the science and history project book after concluding our weather study. 

Today we spoke about the broken earth and Pangaea.  The children have already heard about this from our visit to the museum but it was great to experience it ourselves with a little project.

We created a puzzle of how the continents fitted together when they were known as Pangaea and then illustrated the movement of the plates whilst discussing the patterns of earth quakes and their loose alignment to the tectonic plates.

 

Pangaea

Our moving continents

THE FINAL INSTALMENT ON RECORDING WEATHER

For the last few experiments from the Science and History project book we have been working on various ways to record the changes in weather and we enjoyed making the various tools, including the rain gauge, hygrometer and the weather vane.  Today we experimented with the final method we are observing for recording weather with a cross section of a log. 

Not only do the rings tell you how old a tree is but, by measuring the distance between the rings, you are able to tell when the tree was experiencing hot and cold weather.  Faster growth-hotter weather, slower growth - colder weather.

OUR SILKWORM PROJECT

We have some new pets to observe, silkworms!  They are now into their second week of life and are growing rapidly!  We are really enjoying observing how fast they grow and should soon see them start to form their cocoons, in around 3-4 weeks time.  This should be great fun and every morning the kids run to the box to see how much more they have grown and whether there is any sign of a cocoon being formed.

 

This reminds me so much of my childhood and I am so glad that my children are able to experience silkworms.  I am really sad that they are not able to experience chameleons with me as this was also one of the little treats of my childhood. I had a pet chameleon who I use to enjoy watching for hours every day, catching his flies and changing colour on various different surfaces.  

 

 

 

BFSU LESSON C 2 - SOUND, VIBRATIONS AND ENERGY

Our BFSU lesson this week was on sound, vibrations and energy.

The objectives were:

1. Understand and use the following words in their proper context, vibrations, tone, pitch, frequency and amplitude.
2. Demonstrate and tell how sound and vibrations are related.
3. Analyse musical instruments and voice in terms of producing vibrations.
4. Describe  how we make sound with our voices.
5. Demonstrate and tell how pitch depends on frequency of vibrations.
6. Model how sound is transmitted.
7. Describe how the ear picks up vibrations and translates them into hearing.

For part 1 we experimented with larger and smaller elastic bands to produce a tone and how that tone is affected by the size as well as the tension of the band.  Smaller band and more tension on the band the higher the pitch.     We also experimented with a little guitar to illustrate this lesson as well as spoke about the larynx and how the vocal cords act in the same way as the rubber bands to produce different pitches.   We have covered this in Human anatomy with Apologia already so the children knew quite a lot about the larynx as well as the eardrum.

 

To illustrate the transmission of sound we rolled a marble towards three other stationary marbles alone a grooved surface to show the transfer of movement energy from the rolling marble to the next marble and then the next and now they all remain stationary after knocking into one another except for the last one, which rolls on. 

 

This was used to illustrate that the air particles behave in the same way. "Bumping" into each other all the way up to the eardrum, then transferring the vibrations to the eardrum, and  therefore the sound.

 

This exercise in movement energy required the background of the previous lesson on the various energies, thereby building on the knowledge.

 

 

THE AMAZING BRAIN

I am sure by know you have probably worked out that Science is my all time favourite subject so it will come as no surprise to you that today once again we "did" science.  Thankfully the kids have the same love of science as I have so we all enjoy learning as much as we can about it.

Today and Wednesday are Apologia human anatomy and physiology days and today the boys and I were reading lesson 10 which is the Nervous system extended, since we covered the nervous and endocrine systems in Lesson 9.  I choose this course for the boys as I felt it was too detailed and elaborate for a 5 year old to take in and have been following RSO for Princess Perfect instead. I obviously haven't translated this to her so when it is time to work on Apologia she tends to come along and listen in on the lesson anyway. Well I am surprised at the amount of information she is taking in and will definitely be purchasing an apologia notebook for her next year! 

After reading about the various lobes within the brain and how it is "divided" up she ran off to make a clay model of the various areas and I made labels for her to stick on.

 

Somehow I doubt she will forget this lesson!

OUR BLOOD MODEL FOR RSO SCIENCE

This week Princess Perfect has been studying the circulatory system and we made our own scrumptious blood model to illustrate the various functions of the four parts of blood. 

The plasma was maple syrup.

The red blood cells were lollies and were perfectly shaped with the little dent in the middle!

The white blood cell was the lima beans

The platelets were lentils

 

Ok, only the lollies where scrumptious and were the sugar free variety so allowed to be sampled.

Of course the plasma is naturally straw coloured, it is only the blood cells that make it red.

Unfortunately the red blood cell ended up being bigger than the white blood cell in this experiment as lima beans was all I had to depict the white blood cell !! 

Princess Perfect then completed the accompanying worksheets describing the various duties of the four parts of the blood. 

THE WAY THE WIND BLOWS

Today our page out of "The science and history project book" was on the way the wind blows and we also created the third in our tools built to record weather.  The previous tools being the rain gauge and the hygrometer.

The first experiment showed how the weight of a particle affects how far it travels and the effect this has in creating various sand dunes. 

The used a hairdryer as our wind and noted that the smaller particles of the sand went further down the ice cube tray then the larger particles.

 

 

Then we made a simple weather vane and spoke about anemometers and how they are used to measure wind speed. 

 

Our cat thought it was really tasty!!

 

 



The lessons in this book are fantastic and so quick to pull together into a lesson that the kids really look forward to every week.