Homeschool Science Year in Review (Grades 9, 7, 4)

Developing Plans for Grades 9, 7 and 4 (Yes, starting to homeschool a high schooler! Yikes!)

My oldest started 9th grade this year.  It felt momentous and scary. After all, he was now a 9th grader… a freshman in high school! Yikes!  I felt like I needed to be more official and more public-school-ish. You know, covering one science subject for the entire year. My Sis (who has graduated two of her three homeschoolers and has one entering her senior year this coming year) tried to assure me that it didn’t have to be so overwhelming.  “Just do things as you’ve been doing,” she advised me.  “You’re all doing a great job.”  Still,I felt like I had to change things up.

Physics (Newton’s 3 Laws of Motion, etc.): Since we had done quite a bit with biology & chemistry, I thought I would jump into physics with my oldest.  I chose a physics curriculum that said it was algebra-based (rather than calculus based).  I worked with LD (separately) on that.  We actually got through about 6 or 7 chapters. He said he learned a lot, but we did not finish the book (not by a long-shot!).  We have plenty of time to circle-back round, of course. I am pretty happy with the Physics Curriculum we worked through. We’ll definitely pick up with it again (later).

He covered Linear Motion, Projectile Motion, Newton’s First, Second and Third Laws and Momentum.

But as I said, the science school year didn’t quite turn out the way I had first envisioned. I had thought we would work through the entire book this year.  That turned out not to be the case.

As homeschool life would have it, we took a slight detour!  We wound up doing a Science Club with some other homeschoolers here at our house. So, this fall we did two other big units: Earth Science and Scientific Classification & Taxonomy.

And… we supplemented those units with two (wonderful!) courses from Coursera.

Scientific Classification & Taxonomy

Another topic we covered in our Science Club last fall was scientific classification and taxonomy.  We touched on this when we did our Animal Unit several years ago, but this year we went into a lot of depth.

My kids did some dichotomous key activities and talked about how/why classification is useful.

In the science club, we went into depth about the basic classification system.

By the end of the unit, the kids understood animal classification (domain, kingdom, phylum, etc.), knew 10 or 11 the major animal phyla and some of the major differences among these groups (ie. the differences in the digestive tracts of the platyhelminthes, annelids, etc.).  We used the giant paper and sorting cards (that you see in the picture below) to sort the cards, so by the end the kids could each “teach” others about eukaryotes, prokaryotes, cnidaria, etc. etc!

(Also, as you can see, we did some fun Engineering Challenges in our Science Club.)

In the club, we went into depth about many of the animal phyla and even did some dissection!

Here are the links to the Science Club Posts, if you are interested in creating your own club or checking out what we did week-by-week:

• Science Club Week 1: Characteristics of Good Scientists, Layers of the Earth
• Science Club Week 2: Plate tectonics, taxonomy, mealworms and flatworms
• Science Club Week 3: Taxonomy and Classification, Engineering Challenge
• Science Club Week 4: Understanding Convection Currents, Taxonomy, Engineering Challenge
• Science Club Week 5: Earthquake Vibrations, Platyhelminthes – Annelids (flatworms and earthworms)
• Science Club Week 6: Earthquake Waves (Body and Surface Waves);
• Science Club Week 7: Plate Boundaries, Observation and Dissection (Crabs – Clams/Oysters)
• Science Club Week 8: Convergent Boundaries, Observation and Dissection (Fish)

Life Cycles

As we moved into spring, my youngest, ED, was interested in doing a unit on life cycles again. She really likes doing little independent research writing assignments, so I created a series of writing papers for her. These were the original pages (I can’t remember if I took pictures of her finished work.)

Since lots of kids study various animal life cycles in the earlier grades, I created a new Life Cycle Packet. It’s more than 50 pages and helps kids become familiar with the different stages in the life cycles of the chicken, sea turtle, frog, mosquito, butterfly, dragonfly, bee, mouse, and ladybug.

Chemistry Unit

We had touched on the Periodic Table a couple of years ago, but this year I really wanted the kids to understand what information the Periodic Table shows us, Bohr Diagrams (and how they help us understand the Periodic Table), Lewis Diagrams,  the difference between ions and isotopes, what ionic & covalent bonds are, and things like that.  I was really happy with how much the kids learned!  The kids really liked working with the element and Bohr Diagram cards and we did a number of hands-on activities so the kids really understood the material.

That was our last unit for the year. 🙂

We also talked about balancing equations and used a workbook (I’ll try to remember to add that in.)

What we’re planning :

We really need to do a unit on meteorology and the weather. We need to talk about topics like air masses, fronts, weather patterns and so forth. 🙂  That’s on the agenda for next year!

If you are studying this material, you might want to check out some of the material I made some time back. Most of these are currently free! See this post:

Layers of the Atmosphere, Weather and More!

We’ll also be doing a unit on light, sound, and the five senses… so going into depth about how the eye and how the ear works.

High School Biology Plans:

This next year we’ll be doing biology. As I mentioned last week, we have started with Thinkwell’s Biology Course. It looks like a good fit so far. Here’s what I wrote last week:

We are moving on to a more in-depth study of Biology this coming year (remember, LD is now 14 going on 15 and DD will be turning 13).  We decided to use Thinkwell’s AP Biology Course.  So far, we’ve done the first chapter and LD and DD are really enjoying George Wolfe’s lectures. We watch the lectures together and the kids work on the exercises (multiple choice questions) that go with that lecture.  Each lecture is about 10 to 12 minutes long.  You can try it for free for 14 days to see if it would be a good fit for your family. It’ll let you examine the first two chapters and all the videos. I think this will be a good fit for my older two kids (we’ve done a lot of science), but I’ll keep you posted!! (I’m glad we did the Chemistry Unit first, there was a section on isotopes and the kids totally understood that material!) Some of you may want to know that this course covers evolution in quite some detail.  If you do decide to purchase a Thinkwell course, you can enter my email (Liesl@homeschoolden.com) “Referred by” field for an additional $10 off for you. I would get a referral reward (an Amazon card) if you use this option.

We’ve done about 20 short lectures so far and my older two are enjoying it. George Wolfe, the instructor, is in the top right corner. Notes are added in the white board area (on the right).

We’ll be using this course (I watch with the kids) as well as some other materials.

My main suggestion (as I’ve noted so far) is that you’ll want to have covered some basic chemistry first. I’m glad we just finished the Chemistry Unit and talked quite a bit about isotopes, balancing equations, and so forth.