Lungs, Hearts, and muscles

 it has been an incredible month for science!

I have a friend whose dad is a butcher, and he's been so good to me in the past, and he got me the tongue, esophagus/trachea, lungs and heart (all still connected) of a cow! Seriously, it was awesome!

When I got it, I was a bit worried. It was in this bloody see through garbage bag, and it just seemed pretty gruesome, but I was undaunted, and brought it to school.

We learned quite a bit about lungs from doing experiments that didn't include the cow lungs, including proving that our air is mostly carbon dioxide when it comes out by putting out a candle, showing them a homemade lung model, and how much air your lungs can hold by blowing into a jar filled with water. 

And then came out the lungs (that was still connected to the heart and tubes) it was so big when straightened out, it took up most of the sled I brought to contain it!

We watched this awesome youtube video to help us dissect it:

I think my favourite moment was when Heather Burton came in and the look on her face was not of disgust, but of absolute love of learning. She wanted to know everything. 

I certainly learned a lot. It's one of my favourite dissections I've ever done. I was amazed at how easy it was to see the different air and blood pipes and how those pipes became smaller and smaller until they interchanged oxygen with one another. Also, I didn't realize that your trachea is made up of cartilage hoops all the way, to make sure your air passageways stay open.

Then the next science class we did was about the heart. I had prepared hearts to dissect, but then I had the heart that was connected to the lungs that I kept. HOLY COW there was a huge difference (get it? Holy cow?-moving on.)

We used "We the Curious" Youtube again, and we saw the heart strings, the different chambers and everything.

The red one I'm holding is the fresh specimen, and the brownish grey one is the prepared. It was so hard and smelly. It makes me only want to use fresh specimens ever. It's a whole lot cheaper too! (Free from my friend!)

We had so many activities to do about the circulatory system, that each club (I have a younger and an older) didn't get to all of them. I had these "blood type" tests, and I had never used them before, and so I thought you just pricked yourself and then sent it in to get tested, so I thought that wasn't interesting enough for the Youngers, so I waited until the older came, but then I realized that you could find out your blood type IMMEDIATELY! Cool? Yes.

I only had five tests (one for each of my kids) but I decided that I would do it with anyone willing to get impaled by me. (I'm glad that their parents are my friends because I forgot to ask permission!) and it was so cool to see how the blood reacted differently with the different chemicals on the paper. 

The three non-McKays were all O+ and the McKays were all A-, and I'm so grateful that we had at least two different kinds! We looked at their blood under the microscope. It isn't red under the microscope, it's clear!

And this week we learned about muscles. I wasn't prepared as much as I should have been. I had them watch a few extra Brainpops this week while I finished up my tendon-hands. But they were worth it, they were pretty fun:

 You can't tell in this photo because for the older I ran out of coloured string and used fishing line instead, but there's tendons running down every finger. The rest of them were better than this one, but I forgot to take a photo during science club.

We also did a few activities to feel and be aware of our own muscles.

Yep! Pretty cool science month.

Bones

 WHOO HOOO! 

Alberta is letting homeschool co-ops get together as long as they are in a facility with insurance. I'm not sure exactly what that means, but I'm pretty sure the Alternate School counts, so we got permission to do science there! 

It turned out some more kids came, because it was "sanctioned" by the government, and moms who want to make sure they are following all the rules weren't sure about my at-home science, but now they're back, and it's so good to see them!

We skipped learning about mammals for now, because I thought it would be more impactful to learn about all the systems of the body before we dissect a foetal pig. One girl was so hilarious when I told them my plan of putting the dissection on hold, she said "Wait, can we please make bacon from the pig?"

LOL too bad there's a ton of chemicals in my prepared specimens!

Maybe in the coming weeks we'll have fresh specimens. I've asked a local butcher to help us, and he's helped us in the past, so I'm hopeful.

This week we learned about the skeletal system. We talked about the strength and structure of bones, the joints of bones, and we spent a long time on the spine.

We actually made an edible model of the spine which was the highlight, and it all worked out pretty good!

(The balloons are the heads connected to the spines.)

It was soooo good to get together.

Reptiles and birds

 Soooo sad. We are stopping science club at least until the new year because of the stinker COVID19. I really hope we will be able to commence again soon, but I am honestly not very hopeful. Not until we can start going outside again will this spike go down (I HOPE I'm wrong.)

I wish we could at least do our last club about animal classes (mammals) but we just couldn't.

We had a lesson on reptiles. We didn't have any dissection for reptiles, but I had students bring in REAL LIVE reptiles for show and tell. That was super fun, and the older class brought a turtle that kept pooping all over!

I think this is the turtle from the younger class, he's 35 years old!

We had fun little activities such as putting snake "tongues" on our noses so we could "smell," and putting balloon lizard "tales" on ourselves that we tried to take off....yeah it was a crazy game I made up, but I think they loved it.

I also knew I wanted those sticky hand flinger things to pretend to be lizards' tongues, but they weren't at the dollar store. I knew were I had seen them in town. I took a ton of quarters and went to the dentist's office and asked if I could buy their prizes! I remembered they had the sticky hands as a prize in a gum-ball machine. I felt really awkward, but I got my sticky hands!

Then we talked about birds.  We looked at different kind of feathers and talked about warmblooded animals and we looked at a real nest and other things, and then we dissected owl pellets!!!

One of my favourite activities. It's like a treasure hunt.

This is my friend, Amy, who's been helping me lately. I REALLY appreciate it. She even brought extra owl pellets from her back yard! My owl pellets were from Amazon cost $70 bucks! And even then I wasn't going to have enough for everyone. But with Amy's we did! THANK YOU!

I love how excited the Youngers were when they found a skull or jawbone. The olders were a little grossed out (I just need to brake them in more I guess, silly kids) but most got into it, and look at this cool bird foot one of my science kids found in their pellets:

And now we will wait--and wait--until we do mammals. I guess we could do it virtually, but honestly, you could just watch youtube videos instead. It's about being together in person, seeing things and touching things! I'm bummed.

Fish and Amphibians

 For science, we kept on learning the different classes of animals.

First we learned about fish. We made a "swim bladder," did a couple harmless experiments on real fish, and dissected a fish...which was not harmless.

The next week we learned about Amphibians. We tried to jump as far as frogs can jump, we had a pollywog handout, and we dissected a frog. Do Canadians call them pollywogs, or is it just my English mother that drilled that into me?

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.