The last couple of weeks, we had our Back to School Challenge, but I didn’t write specifically about our upcoming plans. In today’s post, I’m going to talk about our plans for science this year. When planning out for the new year, I think back over the units we’ve covered the past few years. I try to make sure that I cover material again as ED (the youngest of my...
Today I’m going to talk about the science units we covered in our homeschool this year AND what we didn’t get to because we ran out of time!!! My plans are always a bit more ambitious than what we actually cover, but even so it felt like we accomplished a lot! 🙂 This year the kids were in Grades 2, 5 and 7, but below you’ll also find some resources...
Last week we did some pretty fun science experiments for our ocean unit. We always get so pumped up doing hands-on activities & the salinity experiment was especially impressive. I thought I’d talk a little bit what a big impact these kinds of experiments add to our day… the kids get excited and engaged they ask a lot of good questions the activities and projects are memorable so they often...
As many of you may know, I have been working hard to get some of the images in our older posts working again. (It’s a complicated story, but it has to do with our moving our blog from Parents.com where we were for several years, to our new location here.) Anyway, I’ve been fixing old posts and realized I should share some of these posts for our new readers! So...
Today I wanted to share a fun activity we did about rain forest plants. As many of you know, we are doing a large biology unit on biomes, ecosystems, biological interactions, animal relationships, and so forth. At the end of last semester we went over basic animal characteristics — the 5 vertebrate groups, the main invertebrate groups, and some fun activities for my youngest daughter — spiders vs. insects, domesticated...
When I think about all we’ve done this past year in 2015 in science, I’m really pretty amazed! It’s been a fun, full year! This post has links to dozens of our science experiments, printables and hands-on activities. You’ll find direct links to the posts in the table below. We managed to squeeze in various engineering (STEM) type activities here and there. In January of 2015 we were in the...
Today, I want to share the three more chemistry activities we did during our unit on chemistry for my youngest, who is currently 7. Mixtures Un-Mixing: Chromatography DNA Kit Earlier this week, I shared the first two science experiments we did, and you can find those here (and in the free pdf printable at the bottom of this post): Matter is Neither Created Nor Destroyed (Molecules switch atoms) – Chapter...
This semester we’ve been doing a Chemistry Unit for science. We tend to do our science and history units together. In the next two posts, I wanted to share some of the activities I did that were more geared toward my youngest (my older kids have done these before). Then after that I will share the chemistry materials my older two (grades 5 and 7) have used as we’ve delved...
Egg-tivities to get egg-cited for Easter!! Last year around this time we had an egg-cellent time with eggs. I wrote a series of 4 posts sharing all of our activities. At the end of the series, I put together an Egg-speriment Packet. It is 16 pages long and has 13 egg experiments and activities. A few of the things we talked about included Why are eggs shaped the way they are?...
Last week I explained how we made an Earthquake Shake Table and shared a quick video on how we made ours. We first tested it with marshmallow structures. A couple days later, we made “brick” structures out of sugar cubes and peanut butter. We put on the documentary, Deadliest Earthquakes, and set to work. We all built our structures and then brought out our shake table to test them out! The most exciting...
Now that Thanksgiving is over, I have a fun activity for your with your Indian corn. We did this ‘science’ activity with Indian corn a couple of years ago. Soak your Indian corn cobs in a bit of water to see what will happen. We had a large tray with a paper towel and about 1/4 inch of water. We also pour water over the cob every 2 or 3...
We just love hands-on activities! We’ve been studying Earth Science this fall. Back several weeks ago, we explained how we started this unit… with an overview of our solar system, then a closer look at Earth’s geologic timeline talking about the age of the Earth (4.6 billion years) and the appearance of various critters in the geologic timeline (trilobites, sharks, dinosaurs, ants and more). We also l learned about latitude, longitude...
A couple of years ago, we did some spooky science with dry ice. We’re going to do some of these activities again this week, but I thought I’d share some of the things we did then in case you want to try these activities with your kids. I went out and bought some dry ice and we did a number of experiments. You can see suggestions from Steve Spangler science and a...
Last week, I mentioned that we learned a bit about the Solar System in general. This week we’ve been looking more closely at Earth’s long history. We’ve been going over the four major eons and looking more closely at what happened in each (Hadean Eon, Archean Eon, Proterozoic Eon, Phanerozoic Eon). At first 4.6-4 billion years ago, the Earth would have been molten. Then as the Earth cooled it went from liquid...
