Start with a Book!

 I’m a fan!  I love to center a science lesson around a book.  Start with a Book (SWAB) has hundreds of ideas.  Explore Topics, such as Cooking and Food.  SWAB encourages families to use both fiction and nonfiction books—like a cookbook!  Read, grow food, cook!  There are Book-Based Activity Kits to try, such as Bird Buddies.  Here is the activity kit, replete with ideas, such as a bird walk, parts of a feather, habitats, pix of common birds, such as a robin, writing exercises, bird calls, and books!  Just gloss over the political bits and educational jargon in favor of interesting ideas.

Mole Day!

Mole Day is actually Friday.  We’re celebrating today.  Why?  Three teens attend class on Tuesdays and stay after class for 80 minutes to complete Thursday’s lesson.  I don’t want these three teens to miss the fun!  (Yes, we make all kinds of accommodations.)  We are having a modest Mole Day celebration.  I did make Peanut Butter Blossom Cookies or Mole Hole cookies. (No, not molasses cookies.) I tried the candy eyes; Rob and I both thought they looked goofy.  I have prizes for the best mole toy, for both the high school and middle school classes. I did sew a little bandana for the porch goose, too.  I’ll add the mole pix Wednesday.

Food Science

 Food Science makes a great elective or unit study, especially for tweens and teens.  It’s also one of those topics which can be adapted for a wide age range. 4-H has a 436 page Food Science Curriculum.  It’s comprehensive!  You could spend the year wading through this program as a family. There are recipes, questions, activity sheets, experiments—a complete home study.

Younger Kiddos: My American Farm has this teacher’s page with lessons such as Beef Up Your Nutrition, Built From Beef, an activity sheet, and Beef Heritage, an E-Comic.  Try one activity to see if your younger kiddos like the resource; it’s a little goofy.  Their Science Day Camp includes Crazy for Compost, Kick the Can Ice Cream, and Parts of the Plant.  I think the activities would work better for a unit study than a science camp.

Tweens: Food Science Files has Oatmeal Bread, Color Changing Noodles, Garden Lab, Polymer Power, and Salad Dressing Study—just enough for a unit study.  It’s has brief lessons and student hand-outs.  Food Master has both math and science booklets. Yeah!  You do NOT need to send them your information and email.  Look at Milk and Cheese and teacher’s guide; kiddos make cheese from scratch.  Try Fruit’s Math; here are the answer keys for all of the Food Master math units.  Your family can do activity sheets and try recipes.  Food Master can ba adapted into a lesson, a unit, or just a Friday Fun Day!

Teens: Food for Today is a textbook focuses on food science.  Here is the teacher’s guide with answers and experiments.  Once you have a textbook, experiments, and a solution key, you have an instant course.  Since it’s an older textbook, you’ll need to make modifications.  For example, one recipe, Substituting the Sugar, calls for saccharin and aspartame.  Substitute Sucralose and Stevia instead.  BTW there are other Food Science textbooks, typically older books, designed for high school cooking classes.

Apologia Chemistry: Nomenclature

 Next week, the Chemistry Co-op class is beginning Module 3, Nomenclature.  Here are the lesson plans, including Putting Ions in Their Hands.  BTW this is a key module.  Here is my introductory slide deck.

I have used Putting Ions for many years—including the college classes I taught.  It works that well.  One tip is to print the positive and negative ions on to different colored card stock.  (I use a third color card stock for the ion chart, too.  Originally, this was a Flinn kit—with red, blue, and yellow card stock.)  Students may use the ions as long as they need them to name compounds.  At the same time, my kiddos are working on memorizing about 50 key elements on the Periodic Table.  

Be sure to practice!  This practice sheet has practice problems for days…with answers.  Flinn’s ion formula chart has most—but not all of the ions.  This periodic table chart of ions has more.  This ion chart should cover any other missing ions and their names.  One more resource…The Chemistry Name Game.  It use cards with hole punched—much like the numbers of electrons which are actively bonding.  It’s worthwhile if the Flinn ions aren’t working.  Here’s hoping this is helpful.  I know from personal experience just how hard it can be to go ot alone!

Don’t buy expensive science kits. Just do more labs!

 Wow!  The social media influencers are pushing more kits and more subscriptions.  Hold on!  Before you panic shop, pause.  These kits are promoting hands-on science.  You can achieve the benefits of hands-on science by just doing more labs, trying more experiments.  Are you using Apologia’s textbooks?  Just do the experiments in the textbook.  Find a project which interests your kiddos, such as casting wildlife prints or build a catapult.  (We shoot ping pong balls.  This time of year you can find ping pong balls with eyeballs.)  Borrow an armful of science experiment books from the library.  Pick three which are achievable—those which won’t require any special equipment or materials.  Don’t feel as though you are short-changing your kiddos because your budget isn’t elastic enough to buy $500 worth of kits.  Any hands-on lab gives your kiddo more STEM exposure.  

Skip a module or chapter?

 Here we go again!  I’m going to ruffle a few feathers with a bit of heresy.  Sometimes it’s okay to skip a module or chapter.  Are you wading through Module 2 of the second edition of Exploring Creation with Chemistry?  Is your teen in tears over specific heat?  (A few of our kiddos have come close.)  Skip it and move on to Module 3–especially if you did Experiment 2.1 and most of the questions.  Really.  The third edition moved Module 2 to Module 12, which should tell you something.  Rob and I are working like crazy one-on-one with teens to get through specific heat and problem sets.  Both of us have loads and loads of experience.  (Rob teaches math.)  This is a hard concept!

You are going to be stumped.  Another example is Experiment 5.1, Measuring the Width of a Molecule.  There is a ton of math and inferences.  If both your teen and you are in tears, stop.  You might want to copy the sequence of math equations from the slide deck to see if the lesson makes sense.  If not, so what?  No one is going to ask if you skipped the experiment.  Ever.

Instead, do your best.  Try to complete two-thirds of the textbook.  Do as many experiments as possible.  Give the tough material, such as Gas Laws a good try.  But, don’t be defeated by a single module or lab and give up on Chemistry entirely.  Put aside the hardest lessons.  Ask friends if they have encountered the same problems.  Did they figure out specific heat?  Could they show your teen and you how to proceed?  Would it be nice to say you worked through every single concept in the Apologia Chemistry textbook?  Sure.  But sometimes you hit a road block. If your teen, your husband, and you have invested hours trying to make sense of a single idea, such as specific heat, without any success, quit.  Stop beating yourself up!  Your teen is still taking a hard subject and you can only do what you can do.

Fall Science Ideas

 If your family likes to use a theme, Fall is a good one.  HEAV has a collection which includes Candy Corn Catapults.  (Some farms open to the public have trebuchets which launch pumpkins. Let me give a shout-out to Belvedere Plantation.  You have to be there to appreciate the pig races or candy cannon.) HST has an Science ebook: Fall Science Projects, which feature colorful, fall leaves.  Be sure to try Leaf Chromatography.  Explain to your kiddos Why Do Leaves Change Colors?  Do you have Littles?  Check out Little Bins Fall STEM.  

The backyard looks more romantic than in reality.  Missing are the three dogs barking next door and the regular thump from the basketball hoop out front—or the two hundred cars in our tiny dog-leg of thr neighborhood.  But, the pond, trees, birds, ducks and geese sold me on this house.  I’m grateful for view!  We wanted a vibrant neighborhood.  There are I’ve one hundred kiddos.  Their laughter outside is like music.

Art and Science

Is there science in Art?  Oh yes!  We like to marble paper and hydro dip painting.  We all had a blast! Below the images are some more ideas.  Let’s layer this year’s science with some art!

Start with some articles: What’s in Your Paintbox? (history and chemistry of pigments), Chemistry and Art (scroll for stained glass glue), Chemistry and Color (experiments with goldenrod paper), and  Chemistry Colors Our World (learn why the sky is blue).  These are collections of articles and activities.

Playtime Paint is perfect for younger kiddos.  What is paint? Pigment and binder.  Make a batch with colorful chalk and glue.  Chemistry of Color has fruity crayons, sweet dyes, and spice painting, etc.  There are brief explanations following each activity.

Apologia Chemistry: Periodic Table

The Periodic Table is central to Chemistry.  Over the summer, my Co-op Chemistry class made element cards, based on this JCE article.  I cannot emphasize how useful it is for kiddos to make their own element cards.  Just writing the names and symbols and adding a sketch helps them learn the elements’ names.

 Here is a copy of my Periodic Table Lesson.  Next watch The Element song.  It’s a classic.

Another activity is Color Code the Periodic Table.  Really, we’re annotating it.   The little kiddos color code.

We do Flinn’s It’s in the Cards.. This lab (with printable cards) is similar.  Below is a video. 

When we go into trends and configurations, I’ll have more posts.  Please stay tuned!

Young Explorers Chemistry and Physics: Chapter 2

 Finally!  I have an update and a few pix.  This year’s Middle School YECP class has seven kiddos. It is lively.  My husband covered my class the past two weeks after I had surgery.  There was no way he would remember to take photos.  Last week, the kiddos made cartesian divers and did the matter wheel.  Rob had the kiddos review all of the terms in Chapter 2.  Today, we did Drops on a Penny (instead of waxed paper).  We also floated yen on a small bowl of water.

Lastly, we put Pop Rocks in the balloon to inflate.  This didn’t work particularly well.  So, we inflated balloons with baking soda and citric acid, which works as well as vinegar.  However, you can add citric acid to the balloon, put the balloon on the bottle and dump in the citric acid powder.  

The last thing we do in class is to write down the projects and explanations in the journals.  We even had time to complete ‘What do you remember?’ before class was over.  The kiddos do the vocabulary crossword and copy work as homework.  I promised be would make Oobleck (cornstarch and water) when we made slime.  (That’s when we’ll review amorphous solids.) I got a few pix.  Take a look!

Pool Noodles

I saw Generation Genius’s ad for pool noodle science ideas.  Do you need to pay for ideas?  You already know how I feel.  This is a variation on the Penny Boat experiment.  You may want to just go with an aluminum foil boat and skip the pool noodles.  Although it does look cool!

 Last June, at Maker Camp, we made Pool Noodle Flingers and Pool Noodle Balance Boards.  (Years ago, my kiddos made PVC Balance Boards at Science Camp.  They practiced on the concrete patio.  What could go wrong?)  Both were hits! 

Instead of another pricy subscription, let’s see what else you can make with pool noodles? Consider a Pool Noodle Periscope, Pool Noodle Play House, and Javelin Throw.  Littles might like a set of Pool Noodle Building Blocks.  The next time you see an interesting ad, use the idea as inspiration. What else can you make with pool noodles?