Invertebrates

 One week we learned about invertebrates that are NOT arthropods. Featuring Molluscs, annelid worms, and coelenterates. KIDS LOVE WORMS! What can I say? if you want giggles and squeals and a successful science day, just bring out some worms! 

We even dissected worms. 

We also talked about shells, and pearls, and octopi, and we even had the kids EAT snails! The kids thought this was super strange (my French friends did not come, needless to say.) And it was a case of daring and nerves and crazy bravery.

Our next science was learning about invertebrates that ARE arthropods. Featuring insects, spiders, and crustaceans. 

I had asked the kids to start an insect collection two weeks earlier, and I'm glad I did because we had snow for our science day, Some of my kids dutifully put some insects in their freezer or jars and we delighted to show them off. We had an experiment where we had pipe cleaners and pompoms represent insects and they went to "flowers" with glitter "pollen" and we watched as the "pollen" got mixed together. GLITTER WAS EVERYWHERE! 

With the littles, we had a lot more activities involving insects including getting all the stages of butterflies:

But for the older we did dissections of crawdads as well. It was interesting to see teeth inside their stomach! who knew!

Living Things-Biology

 For science, we started our club. We've had them outside for the first few lessons. This year, we are learning Biology. 

For our first club we learned about what actually qualifies something as living. We also talked about Natural Selection. One of the highlights was looking through my telescope at some pond scum where we were able to actually see some moving single celled organisms!!!

Our second lesson was about cells. We made a couple of cell models, including one out of CANDY. Always a hit.

See the DNA/sprinkles inside our Oreo/nucleus? Classic.

We also talked about osmosis, and I had made a "naked egg" from vinegar, and took it out to show the little class (I have two classes, one for littles and one for bigger kids) how big it was, and it exploded on me! I guess I hadn't left it in vinegar long enough!

The next lesson we learned about classification, bacteria, and fungus. For classification, we took a million shoes and created our own taxonomy to decided how to map every shoe. (This is actually something I did in middle school, and I've never forgot it.)

For our main bacteria activity, I had them take a queue tip and try to find some bacteria in my house, and put it in a petrie dish. I'm not sure if it worked, but they had so much fun hunting for nasties!

Also, we ate active yogurt, as you can see.  For fungus we looked at mould and mushrooms and yeast. It's weird to think that mould spores are already on all our food long before they mould!!! 

COVID Science Patheticness

COVID put a stop on my science club for the rest of the year, but here's all the rest of science for the year: 

Last week was "officially" spring break, but those type of things never affect us much, but before this, we did our last Westwind zoom classes. Kind of sad.

Here they are doing a science lesson.

I'm not too sad we had to cancel my science club. We haven't done one since before Argentina. I'm not sure when we'll learn about the PH scale. I did forget that I haven't given out our crystals we made before COVID. I'm sending them out tomorrow.

During Summer, we got together outside:

ALSO I did two science clubs. The first one we learned about emulsions and colloids. We did this in my back yard and lots of kids came. It was pretty fun making mayonnaise, looking at oil in water and other fun things.  This is milk being effected by soap:

We also had a class about the PH scale. We made cabbage indicators that worked and Turmeric indicators that didn't work and tasted lots of acids and bases. It was a pretty fun class.

Boiling points, chromatography, and Crystals

Science was canceled a few times because of sickness or family week, or whatever, but we did do some.

One week we learned about freezing and boiling points. We saw how adding ingredients (like salt) to water affected the freezing and boiling points. We also made "instant ice" which didn't work with the little kid class because my water wasn't cold enough at that point-blah. At least it worked with the olders.

Next class we learned about chromatography. We also did "walking water" as part of this, but as I was doing it, I kind of realized it wasn't chromatography, because instead of separating mixtures, we were putting things together, but oh well.

We also learned about crystals!!! We made borax crystals, sugar rock candy crystals and eggshell geodes. We also broke open some real crystal geodes.

Of course, the borax and sugar won't be ready for some time (actually, at this moment, the borax has been finished.)  It ended up being A LOT of work for yours truly after the kids had gone: making super saturated solutions and containers with dangling crystal starters to make crystals in.

Honestly, I'm a little scared my sugar crystals won't work. I have the best recipe, but I didn't follow it because my pots were too full, and couldn't fit any more sugar, so I'm worried it doesn't have enough sugar.

Metals and Solubles.

For science, we had a lesson on metals. We talked about all the characteristics of metals and did experiments to exemplify those characteristics. We talked about luster, conductivity, solidness, malleable, elasticity, ductile and hardness, and here is a photo of me listing them as we explored each one, but you can't read it very well.

The next week we talked about Soluble vs insoluble. We made water/oil lava lamps as part of this which everyone loves:

We also brought out the nail polish and talked about how nail polish is not soluble to water, but it is to acetone and then we brought out the nail polish remover. Guys, during this lesson 8 years ago, I wrecked a table with nail polish remover. I was not going to do this again. I put on a table cloth.

Well, the kids got really carried away with the nail polish (I think most little boys have a secret hope of playing with nail polish and can fully feed that hope when their science teacher tells them to) and I didn't clean up right away, and there was a HOLE in the table cloth, and my table noticed. Whaaahhh.

Reactions

For science, we've been learning about reactions and how certain things effects reactions, such as heat, light, surface area, concentration, and of course catalysts, and what better catalyst is there than mentos in coke:

We also talked about exothermic and endothermic reactions. I wanted to do elephant toothpaste for this, but it was a major fail. BLAH! I need good high concentration hydrogen peroxide!!!

But we didn't have science the next week because it was COLD. Really cold. So cold, that vehicles didn't start and people would start coughing by just going outside.

Carbon Dioxide, and the Water Cycle

Science- we had two science clubs since I wrote last time. The first week we learned about oxygen and carbon dioxide. We did things on air pressure too if I remember right. This year I actually remembered to get ready for this lesson and made some carbon dioxide indicators from a lime solution. These take over 24 hours to prepare, and I usually forget to prepare that far in advance, so this was the first time we actually did it, and it worked!

Next week we focused on the water cycle (perfect timing for watching Frozen 2 which in a round about way talks about it.) As part of this we showed how hot water rises and cold water sinks. Red is hot and blue is cold. In the purple one the red had been on the bottom and they mixed immediately.

I also had them draw pictures of the water cycle.

Pretty cute eh?