So far so good on the set up of the free chemistry class I want to teach this year. I will test run it and help some students prepare for the math of chemistry in a 5 week summer class that runs July 9th to August 10th.  Then the full 2007/8 school year course rolls out right after it begining late August.

The online, live classroom side of it will be extremely fun to do. I have been busy making the interactive slides for some of the early modules. You can make some neat hands-on activities with the whiteboard. Last night I made a graduated cylinder that the kids can actually change the scale on, liquid/meniscus levels, and practice reading giving the correct number of significant figures. That is so much more fun that a static picture of a graduated cylinder with liquid in it. I am busy making tons of chemistry games that we can use while learning a new concept and then practice in the game time after class when the kids can socialize and play agaianst each other. It is going to be so much fun!

I like meeting with the students in a live online classroom. We all get to hear, interact, and learn together without a long drive to get to the teaching parent's house everyday. We can even show up in our PJs and slippers. Hehehehe.

We also have a website for the assynchronous parts of the class and to store all the great resources. Feel free to go see it at THIS LINK especially if your family will be doing chemistry this next year.  You can just use guest access if you want. Feel free to register if you wish too. It is all free.

I have designed it so that if other co-op teachers that are teaching chemistry this year wants to jump in can use the resources, website, or we can even the online classroom by sharing the load and teach a few weeks on and a few weeks off with each other taking turns. We just bring all the co-op kids into the online classroom together. The room I have for one year has unlimited seating, so it should work super.

If you are interested in learning how to join in on the class and/or the co-op, let me know by e-mail. My address is armoorefam@centurytel.net. My name is Tammy.

Did King Phillip Come Over For Good Spaghetti?

No we didn't have any royal company for dinner. It is a mnemonic to remember the classification system:  Domain, Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, and species.

We worked on mapping out the taxon of nine organisms today: domestic cat (Felis catus), domestic dog (Canis lupus), American brown bear (Ursus americanus), human (Homo sapien), goldfish (Carassius auratus), Blackburnian Warbler (Dendroica fusca), honey bee (Apis mellifera), bess beetle (Odontotaenius disjunctus), and fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster).

Here are a few pictures of the project (click on thumbnail to see it larger):

We have done microscope labs in the past, but we had  really nice compound microscope to get to work with today, so it made today's lab really special. We also had a fresh pondwater sample from the TI pond. This pond is really large and healthy, so I knew we would get to see some real treasures.

First, here are the topics we covered (we followed Gregory's college lab book):

O  Proper microscope carrying method

O  Proper names for the parts of the microscope

O  Differences in parts and uses of a disecting microscope and a compound microscope.

O  Focusing on and locating specimens with all three objectives (lenses on nosepiece). we found Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial on a penny.

O  Computing total magnification (multiply the ocular and objective lens)

O  The differences and methods of dry-mount & wet mount slides.

O  The uses of a standard flat slide and a depression slide

O  Methods of pippeting a plenaria so it doesn't attach itself to the inside of the pipet. LOL

O  What Protoslo is used for. It thickens the water so the critters will stay put.

O  Water daphnias are hard to catch in a pipet. Hehehe

O  How to use a dichotomous key to identify a macroinvertabrate.

O  How to stain specimens so specific structures are visible (eyosin Y, methylene blue, iodine)

O  The kids prepared slides or looked at: onion membrane, epithelial cells, pond water critters, the immensely busy world in a drop of water from mom's English Ivy she is rooting (surprise! - there were more critters in there than in our pond water), a scab (a whim of Tim), hair, and much more.

Now, you get to enjoy some pictures of all the fun!

Shots of the kids (click on thumbnail to see it bigger):

OK, the next one needs some explaining. Melody cheerfully looked at all kinds of wiggly, "disgusting", creatures, but it was Tim's epithelial (cheek) cells that tipped her over the edge and gave everyone a good laugh.

OK, next we will share a few of the sights we got to enjoy through our microscope.

algae

algae

onion membrane stained with Eyosin Y

Baby snails still in the 'jelly'. We could see the heart beating!

Sorry, our photo of the Eyosin Y stained cheek cells didn't turn out.

We had tons of fun today!

Well, Zach is up and running on his Ears and Hearing E-Notebook as well as his Sound E-Notebook. If you want to see his e-notebook pages just go to his blog at http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/ZMoore/

The last time our family did a unit on sound it was before we began e-notebooking. Though Zachary at 5 years of age is too young to expect him to e-notebook independently, it will be fun recording Zach's adventures for him and letting him begin learning to make these himself. Looking back, I wish I had at least taken pictures of when the older kids did their units. With the older kids being 18, 16, and 12 now I have learned that the memories are worth the cost of the film and time to get the pictures. They grow up so fast!

When we did the study with the older kids a while back, we made a concept map. It was in pencil on paper. I converted the pencil one to a digital one to base Zach's e-notebook on. Many of the concepts will be too advanced for him now, but the beauty of e-notebooking is that when we return to the topic in a few years he can add to and modify his e-notebook to accommodate his growing understanding.

Here is the concept map. Just click the thumbnail to see it larger.

We skipped the fireworks this year and went for a wet explosion instead. Take a look . . .

It was easy to do. We loaded up a test tube with Mentos mints and used a card to be able to turn them upside down and position the mints over the soda neck. We pulled the card out over a freshly openned bottle of diet soda and ran! The Mentos create a physical reaction that explosively releases all the carbonation in the soda in an instant. We tasted the soda afterward and it was like lemonade - no carbonation left in it. This was tons of fun and my ears are not left ringing from fireowrks this year. LOL.

Want to see a way to do this with a different riggering mechanism than a test tube? Watch the video here - http://wm.kusa.gannett.edgestreams.net/news/1150759303486-06-19-06-spangler-4p.wmv

It's not too late to record the NOVA for this week. I almost missed it myselg because I assumed they would air the Kaboom episode closer to the 4th of July. But I was wrong. They are already airing it this week. So check your TV listings now. We are going to save our recording and not watch it until the week of the 4th. Here is the companion website to the episode: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/fireworks/

Also use this one: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/fireworks/

Here is an idea of how you can turn the learning into a neat momento - Take pictures of your 4th of July fun and then create a scrapbook page showing what elements/metals are used to create the colors in fireworks. Here is the page we made a few years ago -

(Click on the thumbnail to see it larger)

I stumbled across an awesome webpage for doing a cow eye dissection! Here is the link: http://www.exploratorium.edu/learning_studio/cow_eye/

I am also posting our own Eye Dissection page from when we did our dissections. Beteween the two resources you might feel inspired to give it a try yourself. Notice how different the preserved cow eye in our lab differs dramatically from the fresh pig eye in our lab and also how much it differs from the fresh cow eye in the webpage one (link listed above). So, if it is at all possible to get a fresh eye, IT IS WORTH THE TROUBLE TO GET ONE! Click on the thumbnail to see it full size.

Today I am trying to gear up for our summer unit on plant biology. It is the last of our three part biology study - we studied animal biology two summers ago and human biology last summer.

I have to admit to really dreading this last subject area. I have a black thumb and most of the kids in the family have allergies. None of us are very outdoorsy. We tend to read, do computer stuff, and work on art projects. But, today I worked at drumming up some personal enthusiasm.

One area of great promise to focus our studies on popped up in response to my dilemma of how to teach about plants when the kids are so allergic to pollens. Just on a impulse I thought I would see if there were any such thing as a hypo-allergenic plant. It turned into a delightful 4-hour internet rabbit trail. Yes, there are low allegen plants. A fellow named Ogren has devoted several years of research to developing a pollen scale that helps horticulturalists rank the allergen properties of plants. His website is here.

After getting an initial feel for Ogden's OPALS index (wind pollinated plants are high allergen plants and insect/bird pollinated plants are low allergen plants), I delved into finding out about the plants we already had established in the yard.

I was delighted to discover that we have a very low allergen grass - St. Augustine. We also are trying to get English Ivy started as a ground cover under the trees because the St. Augustine is having a hard time growing there. I also hope to trelis the ivy to hide the wall air conditioner that sticks out like a sore thumb on the front of the house. The bulb flowering plants that I have out front are low allergen - day lillies, spider lillies, and iris.

Most of the trees, however, are allergen nightmares. LOL. We have several oaks, two pecans, a sycamore, a sweetgum, and privet so plentiful it grows like a weed everywhere. Every one of these is a high allergen tree. Fortunately we do have a few low allergen ones too - fig, plum, apple, crape myrtle, and peach. Pine is listed on the low allergen list which is a surprise to me. I hope that is right considering that we have about 300 in the yard that we planted a few years ago. If I am understanding it correctly, the main pollen time for trees is in the spring. After that tree polination is finished and the other green stuff takes over.

I want the kids to raise some garden plants this year and we have already started them using a greenhouse kit. The tomato seedlings have already begun to sprout. We also have bell peppers, a few beans, several spice/herb seeds beginning to germinate. Oh, and onions too. I couldn't find OPALS ratings for garden vegetables. Just guessing from the fact that most of them are insect pollinated though, they should be great.

I think that low-allergen plants will make for a wonderful research theme this summer. We certainly will not be digging up or cutting down established plants, but new plant selections and neighborhood education projects would definitely have some study value.

Today is Rocks and Minerals Co-op Day. The kids learned so much. Here is what we did.

I have spent the past few weeks in the co-op building up the science notebook foundational skills. We have covered the researching skills of locating sources, ciring/bibliography of those resources, and the many ways that notes can be taken and organized. They have worked on how to write an informal lab write up. Today, they had to put all of that together in use in one day.

Today we focused on the Chemical section of the Rocks and Mineral E-notebook.

The kids began by doing research in the three fundamental areas for this section: Crystal Lattice, Metal vs Non-Metal, and the Chemical Groupings of Minerals (only the top 5). They will have to use proper MLA standards for citing their resources, so they had to take note of where they found their information. That is a hard thing to remember to do sometimes.

They worked as a team, gathering their notes onto a group wiki. That was a good test of the wiki system in Moodle at The Virtual Homeschool Group Website. The kids were in three groups, each team researching individual parts of the topic and adding the notes for their topic to share with the whole group. Here are some pictures of them at work (click on the thumnail if you want to see it bigger):

You can see their notes (though they will continue to expand them) at http://www.virtualhomeschoolgroup.com/vhsg/mod/wiki/view.php?id=1622&page=groups&thankyou=1

None of the kids did an undigested copy/paste notes (Yay! I hammered that one home). It will take some experience to get to where they have a knack at organizing information on the fly without a pre-organizer. But that is to be expected. It will also take time to get the feel for boiling down a resource to basic facts, how to record them without wasting to much time 'compositioning them' , and when to quote and cite. Practice is the key to those skills. We will get plenty of that. LOL.

I wanted to bring Zachary and Maria in to the activities more today. I have a copy of 3-2-1- Classroom contact. The older kids used the episode to practice taking notes from a video source while the younger ones just enjoyed and absorbed information in a form they would respond to well. One of the scenes in the video is of the girl being a molecule with specific shapes that are then made into a crystal lattice. This was an important scene for the little ones because they would become our models to do this for the e-notebooks.

Kid crystal latiices are a fun way to illustrate the concept. Zachary and Maria loved being the 'center of the show' as they posed as molecules. They made a 4 point molecule, a 3 point molecule, and a two point molecule. Only one of the kid crystal lattices are done so far. Here it is:

To see the image full size, just click on it. I will post again so you can see the other two kid crystal pages once they are done.

After the kids finished the posing and photography for the lattices, we all went inside to do the crystal lab.

First, I reainforced what crystals were with hands on time with the family rock collection. During that time I was able to get some general review in too. 

Then we began the lab itself. I opted to do the sugar crystals because not only would the kids get to enjoy watching them grow over the next few weeks and months, but all that patient observing would come with the tasty treat of getting to eat the crystals in the end. It also gave us the opportunity to revisit the characteristics of a mineral. One of which is that it can only be a mineral if it in inorganic. They know from biology co-op over the sumer that sugar contains carbon and therefore is organic. That helped them to realize that the lab was somewhat akin to making a model of a mineral.

I will let the kids speak for themselves about how they did the lab. They will be posting their lab write-up pages (to their learning journals) after they have finished them tomorrow.

All in all a busy and productive day. They are using the skills they have been using, getting content knowledge in, and had lots of hands-on opportunities. A good co-op day.

Tim's learning journal word-wrap feature has become corrupted, so this is an experiment to see if he could make an entry here and then transfer it to his own journal with the carriage returns in the correct place. It also serves as an example of a learning journal entry here in my blog for the electronic notebooking moms to use.

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