Science - Heart, Blood, & Circulatory System

I am very limited in what I can handle in a week and I have learned I can not teach all subjects every day, or even every week, so we rotate. That is part of the amazing thing about an living education is that you remember it well, NO meaning less, needles reviews win win for everyone! 

every two or three weeks we take a week off from our Travels and for science we are studying Anatomy the boys have been asking for some time and I thought it fit well since we are studying people, around the world why not study our bodies in science. I have LOVED it and have learned a TON I never new. This week the Heart! we read books and listened to each others heart beat.

On another day we made a model showing how the heart pumps blood.

On the next day we made play bough heart models and labels the parts and they kids narrated their functions, and what they do.

Ethan at work

Aaron at work

We also learned about the blood and what it does- so fascinating! We watched THIS amazing song and sang it each day. I saw this super cool activity making a model (super big) of the blood. And I wanted to do it, but what I thought was red water beads ended up being pink, (oops) and you were suppose to use white ping pong balls but I forgot and was not making a trip to the store just for that so I used clear water beads, then purple for the hormones (not accurate size) but I wanted them to remember that the blood is a message delivery service too! water for the platelets and they remembered that the blood also takes out the garbage too.

We did this on Friday, and they narrated everything they learned about heart and blood as they played with this. Loved it.

this was one of my favorite science weeks so far, I learned a ton!

Bones, Cells & DNA Activities

For science we focus on a different area in Anatomy each week. Although we do not do science every week. Here are some of the activities we did. Along with reading really great books, and sometimes a movie to go along with it. Someday I will type up the full planns if you are interested in it let me know. 

The first week we just did an overview of the body systems one of the things we did was we made these cute accordion booklets the boys LOVED them! They carried them around in their pockets and would pretend to do "surgery" on each other in the different systems, pulling it out of their pockets to see what system they would work on, taking out certain parts. Kind of gross I have to admit but they were having fun and learning the systems. 

 The next week we learned all about cells. The activity we did along with that was making a pizza cell the boys LOVED this! They designed their own pizza finding something to represent each part of the cell, we used a diagram to fallow in one of our books. They ate them right up!

 Boys making a silly face with their finished pizzas.

 The week after Cells we learned about DNA (see pictures bellow for activity- sorry not the right order)

 After DNA we learned about the Skeleton, and did lots of games and activities. They LOVED making Mr. Bones. I got this pattern from a book we are using and had it copied on really thick card stock and used brads to hold it together, he is  now part of our family and hangs on the walls. I make little label cards from card sock and they match the name to the right bones. We also did games where I would call out the bone and they would point to it.

 We also did this work sheet where we fill in and color the bones. The younger boys did a skeleton do to dot I found on Pinterest.

 This is one of the books we read, it is a super fun Skeleton book we read teaching fun facts about the bones.

 DNA! We studies this, and for the activity we build DNA! we did two smaller ones then hooked them together to make a big one. We found some examples on Pinterest to fallow.

After Skeleton we learned about the Muscle system.
For our activities, we did a fun Word search and coloring page and watched a Magic School bus one day and a Bill Nye about bones and Muscles.

Science Program - Chemistry

We finished our American History program, and we did not go a lot of science and so the kids wanted to do science everyday! well ok we did not do it everyday but almost. 

I was able to get Real Science for kids on ebay for a great deal so I go that We did Chemistry, and I also got Physics and Biology. We have finished Chemistry, and we have done half of physics. I do like them, but I would not say they are "worth" the original price but if you can find them used they are wonderful. There are experiments for each chapter and that is really nice. Although there were a couple we skipped.

here we are making molecules out of marshmallows. (Yes I bought them for this only, and no my kids did not eat them, and yes they were ok with it.)

I have supplemented with other books too, my kids LOVE this book called Transformed it is a little outdated but still really fun to read. I even really like it. It tells how a lot of things are made reminds me of like what Mr. Rogers did on his show but in a book.

We also picked different elements to learn about- I got these two books Periodic Table - fun this is a cartoon type books as if each element is a character my kids love it.
This book is AWESOME! Elements
it has really examples and pictures of the elements and really awesome facts and history along with it. this book really is for older kids, and will be used for years here.

As we came along things in our science we would read more about them, scientist or elements or other things. We also watched some Bill Nye to go along with it. I wanted to share all those details but I do not have time to post all that now. Maybe someday but for now, this will have to do.

Flubber Fun!

My kids picked up the flubber book at the Library, they loved it, and thought it was sooo funny. I have not read it but I am sure it is pure twaddle. But I am ok with a little funny humor just to be enjoyed. I ended up finding the old movie at the Library and the kids watched that and laughed the whole time

 So I thought it would be a fun thing to make Flubber. They LOVED it. I used WAY to much green though it turned there hands green! but I was trying to make it dark like the movie. Dallin was sad it did not bounce like the movie but he still really enjoyed it.

 I don't remember the recipe but I found it on Pinterest, I also looked up a video on the science behind it and we watched that and talked about it as well. Here is the link to it FLUBBER!

 We keep this in a air tight container and the kids pull it out and play with it every now and then, it will dry out eventually but lasts a while.

Love my super silly boys

Random Fun things...

These are just some random picture from some of the stuff we did. I would like to be super organized with regular experiments, art project and activities, but I am not. In a perfect world I would like art once a week, and science with a hands on project once a week, and then a history or whatever other subject hands on activity, or even math once a week. But it never goes that way. And I am now ok with it. We do the projects and things when we get to it.

Here are the boys are doing a project from one of the science books we have about light, and color they had a lot of fun with this section.

I love these books we have a few of them. They are fun and colorful. I love that they really are pretty advanced. For my younger kids I do not read it all, just skim it, and look at the pictures and talk about it but for my older kids there really is a lot for them to take in. They are for ages 5-10 the author is Kimberly Brubarker. We read this book, and then made balloon rockets an idea I found on pintrest. The LOVED it! and want to do it again!

I am really enjoying our Art Program (ARTistic Pursuits) Here the kids are using water color crayons to make a picture. I also want to mixing this up with other things too... I will share whenever we get around to actually doing it... if we do... ha ha

Ethan is really into reading and writing, and enjoying learning vocab. The way we do Vocabulary is when he is reading, he underlines words that he does not know. I trust him to be honest and do this. I am sure he does not always, but many times he does add words to his list. We also add words to the list as he reads to me, or as I am reading and he will ask what a work means. He keeps this running list and then once a week he picks 2 words from this list, and he uses this page that I made up in word. Where he writes the word, then the definition, which he looks up on the ipad, then we talk about to to make sure he understands it. Then he comes up with a way to use that word in a sentence. Then he draws a picture of the sentence he created. This works for us I feel like it is efficient and you can do it as often as you like. I do not know how to share word documents on a blog so if you want it them ask me.

Aaron is doing one of the boys favorite games, making up silly sentences. We have a game that we bought from a used home school book sale but often times we like to make up our own. And we cover a little grammar along the way. The pics "things" or "people" and I write them on note cards that I cut into strips. Then they think of "adjectives" and I write those. I think in this lesson Aaron was learning how state of being and linking verbs work. We also will reads some fun grammar books too.

Here Ryan built out of Legos When we learned about the Erie Canal- I think I may have already posted about this so sorry if it is a repeat, but often times the kids like to act out or build things we have learned about and I love it when they do that.

Here is when we did a Volcano science lesson- this was back in the fall of 2012

this was  a few months ago, it was our Balloon Rockets- we are for sure doing this again, and I bet that wont me the last time either. I will for sure make the strings longer next time. 

Ethan is doing a math activity with a book that we got at a yard sale, basicly it is copy work, but it is good way for him to pratice those math facts. Aaron is going a game with a dart gun he hits a number then a nother number then he add or subtracts them. He has a +/- dice I made that he rolls. I got plain dice at a teacher store and put the symbles on them.

Science Activies...

My kids LOVE science, we only do official science lessons 1-2 times a week because our main unit study, is All about animals and nature so that itself includes a lot of science.

we use Winter Promises Science program. (click for a link) the one we are using this year is a little different as I bought a used set of books+ teachers manuel on ebay. I love their programs and teachers manuals, so easy to use they have hands on easy things for kids to do, the lessons are not long, make prep easy for me!
Above: the boys learning about the length of days in the seasons, and the way the sun rotators, and the way the earth rotates.
Here we are learning about water/ice and salt, and how it effects causing ice to melt faster. The kids did an ice fishing activity- and really enjoyed it.
Here we talked about water and oil and how they don't mix and for fun we added alka seltzer to create bubbles, and talked about gas, since we could "see it" in the bubbles, this was part of our solids, liquid and gas section of our study- the kids LOVED this...
just a little pink into some of the things we did for science over the past few months