The Human Body

The pre-interview:
Seth: We have blood cells. There's good germs and bad germs. If you fall, you'll get germs. You have lots of blood. Inside you the blood is blue, and outside you, it's red.

Hannah: You have lungs and a heart and molecules and blood and blood cells and a brain and eyes. Without a body we couldn't do anything, and without a spirit, our body couldn't do anything.

I checked out a few books from the library...the simplest and funniest being "Armpits to Zits" which was an alphabet book of body parts and a little about them. It was pretty fun. We covered the muscular system and nervous system most specifically. We learned different types of muscles...how nerves and receptors work. We talked about the different areas of the brain and what parts of your body they control. I let them sort of lead the discussion...going more into detail about the stuff they were most interested in.

Seth's preschool had done this next activity with the whole class, and I sort of stole it and made it my own. Obviously, it was going to be different doing it with two kids, instead of a whole class. But basically, we pretended that we were inside a giants body, and we were cells and such, doing various jobs. I labeled the couch as the brain, the cedar chest as the heart, and the entertainment center as the lungs. Then we acted out some different scenarios. Such as:

• the blood cells picking up oxygen in the lungs and returning to the heart and then being sent to the rest of the body...
• the giant fell and scraped his knee, and a germ got in the cut...so the white blood cells took care of that germ!
• the giants cut was bleeding, so a coagulant came and helped the red blood cells stick together and form a "shield"
• the giant got his shots and the "weak measles germ" was sent in through the "needle" and the white blood cells took care of it...the antibody watched the white blood cells do their work, so he could remember for the next time. Then the "real measles germ" entered the giants body, and the white blood cells didn't know what to do, so the antibody showed them what he had learned...and they were able to kill the measles germ.

This was a surprising lot of fun. The kids loved it, and they wanted to do it again and again.

Here is Miss Oxygen waiting in the lungs for the blood to pick her up.

Here is Miss Germ coming in the cut.

Here is Captain Antibody, saving the day!

And here is the coagulant helping the red blood cell stick to the other red blood cells. (The coagulant was being very goofy.)

Then I had Seth lay down on a big piece of paper and I traced the outline of his body. I let the kids loose with markers, string, and popsicle sticks, and they tried to recreate the body. The toilet paper tube was all Hannah's idea. It's the esophagus. They kind of got bored before the whole body was finished, but they had fun while it lasted. I loved the red and blue string for the blood vessels.

Post- Interview:

Seth: A coagulant makes all the blood cells stick together and make a shield. The brain sends messages to your feet. Your bum is the biggest muscle. (When this little fact was read, it was followed by 20 minutes of intermittent giggling.) Your elbow is a joing and helps you bend. Germs come and white blood cells surround it until the germ dies. And Mr. Antibody teaches white blood cells what to do to fight.

Hannah: Your belly button is a scar. Your heart pumps the blood to all your body. The white blood cells kill the germs. There's really such thing as the antibody, and it saves the day. (She had thought this was just a joke). There's two sides of your brain. You have a brain stem. You feel dizzy if those things in your ear don't work.

Volcanoes

The Pre-Interview:

Seth: Volcanoes blast. They have lots of lava in them. And gas. They make special kinds of rocks. They are really hot. They are red. They can kill people.

Hannah: They erupt. They can kill people. There was a volcano called Mt. Vesuvius, and it erupted on a town called Pompeii and Pompeii was buried in all the ash.

We talked about the layers of the earth and how magma is in the core...we talked briefly about fault lines and the plates rubbing together. I showed them how magma comes up through cracks and finally erupts out of a volcano. We looked at maps to guess where the most volcanoes would be. We talked about how lava cools and the different kinds of igneous rock left behind. We talked about the difference between active, dormant, and extinct volcanoes. We talked about the damage caused by volcanoes...by lava, ash, etc. Then we talked about the benefits of volcanoes, in farmland, natural heating, etc.

And on to the fun part...

We built a volcano out of salt dough.

Ingredients:
1 cup of salt
1 cup of flour
1/2 cup of water (may add more)

Instructions:
In a large bowl, combine the salt and the flour
Make a well in the salt/flour mixture and add the water
Knead until smooth and shape into a ball
When not in use, wrap in plastic or store in an airtight container
HINT: To get a softer dough you can add more flour. Adding more salt will lend a more granulous affect.

I added some red and yellow food coloring to give it a little color, but it was still pretty light. Then I added red food coloring to some elmer's glue and made the little drips down the side of the volcano...just so it looked COOL! We built the volcano around a small bottle. In the bottle I put some baking soda, a little water, some red food coloring, and a squirt of dish soap (to make it bubbly). Then we added the vinegar when we wanted it to erupt. It was perfect because we could erupt it over and over again.

When Katy and Cru woke up from their naps, we decided to head up the road a little bit to an area that has quite a few extinct volcanoes. I let the kids walk around on the lava beds...we would have hiked to the top of the volcano, but it was well over 100 degrees, and I didn't want to kill them, so we just examined the lava rock and talked about how it was formed. We drove far enough up the road to be able to see down on the top of the volcano a bit and see how it showed the center of the volcano. They thought it was all very cool, and Seth would have been to the top of the volcano had I not been the voice of reason. Maybe we'll do it this winter sometime.

Post-Interview:

Hannah: Inside the earth there is lots of lava. Earthquakes are made by two plates smashed together. The lava comes through cracks in the ground and comes out volcanoes.

Seth: Volcanoes can cover up the earth with ash. There's lava under the earth called magna (he meant magma). Some volcanoes are extinct, some will go again. Lava turns to stone.

Next Week: The Human Body

Fossils

The inspiration for this weeks lesson came from Beka. So thanks, Beka!

The initial interview: What do you know about fossils?
Seth: Things land in mud and stay there for a very long time and turn into fossils. Scientists study the fossils so they can know what lived in the dinosaur land.

Hannah: When they land in mud they stay there for a very long time, then the sand gets dry, then turns hard, and turns into rock, and makes a fossil.

We talked about the different ways fossils can be formed...under water, compressed by sand, etc. We talked about the different ways fossils are discovered...exposed by erosion, excavated by paleontologists, etc. We talked about what fossils can do to help us learn about our earth and the things that took place long ago. We read a book about Roy Chapman Andrews, to sort of put a face to the abstract nature of paleontology. This guy discovered the first dinosaur egg fossils in Mongolia in the 1920's...proving without a doubt that dinosaurs hatched from eggs. It is rumored that he was the inspiration for Indiana Jones...which appealed to Seth especially!

We have collected fossils over the years. Some family friends own property about an hour from here that is a treasure trove. The area was once a sea...millions of years ago, and now it is a mountain. The fossils are of shells, and there are hundreds of them! So we got out our fossil collection and looked at them and guessed what had happened to preserve them into fossils. We also talked a little about petrified wood.

Beka had said that she was going to make fossils with her kids, and so I decided I would try it, too. My sister had given me the vertebrae of a small animal (probably mouse)...thinking that my kids would think it was cool. It was perfect timing, because we decided to use it to make our "fossils". I mixed up a batch of plaster of paris, and we filled the bottoms of plastic cups with it. After it had hardened for about 10 minutes, we put the vertebrae and one of the shell fossils in it, leaving the impression. We let them harden for a few days, and they turned out awesome!

As part of our lesson, I wanted to take the kids to the dinosaur museum. A local man started to excavate his property to build on it, and discovered dinosaur footprints. The excavation stopped right then, and now, years later, a whole new kind of excavation goes on there! They have built the museum right around the site, leaving the fossils largely undisturbed. There are scientists and paleontologists right on site, and you can watch them working. It's not a large museum, by any means, but it's so cool for the kids to see what kinds of dinosaurs used to hang out around these parts! Here they are making some dinosaur rubbings.

An egg nest:

The new face of paleontology:

And the final interview:

Hannah: People didn't know if dinosaurs laid eggs until the scientists found dinosaur eggs. There are lots of fossils where the layers of rocks are (sedimentary rocks). Where we found our fossils used to be an ocean...that's why we have shells fossils.

Seth: A scientist (Andrews) found eggs and more fossils. Some animals got stuck in tar and died and it preserved them. They get covered up with sand and mud and turn into rock.

This was a fun one. It consumed a lot of our week, and the kids are still talking about it!

Next week: Volcanoes.

Turtles/Tortoises

This week we were a little stumped on what to do for "school." That is, until we got to meet this little lady on Sunday.
My parents were walking up on the Red Hill, and saw her. They called us to see if we wanted to come see, so I took the kids and headed on over. By the time my parents had called us, and we drove back up to where they had seen her, she had traveled a bit...so Hannah got to help Grandpa and Marcie "track" her for a while. They found her pretty quickly, and we all got to look (but not touch) until she started acting a little worried. So we let her alone.

On the way home in the car, Seth suggested that we learn about tortoises and turtles for school this week. So we did. Incidental learning at its finest!

What they already knew:
Hannah: They have hard shells. The turtles have flippers and tortoises have legs. They go up on land to lay their eggs and they cover them up with sand so that other animals won't get their eggs. You can know how old they are by looking at the rings on their shells.

Seth: Tortoises can't swim and turtles can. They can put their heads into their shells. They have a hard shell so their predators don't eat them. Some are both water and land livers. The turtles in the water have fins for swimming and the tortoises have claws for land. (I think he meant flippers, not fins, but whatev!)

There was so much to learn about turtles that I tried to make it more concise by taking a few facts, and writing them on a picture of a turtle. Then I took another copy of the drawing and colored it, and cut out little parts of it like a puzzle. Then they took turns pulling off the little pieces and revealing new facts. I used the books from the library to illustrate some of the points better. We learned how to tell the difference between a turtle and a tortoise. We learned how to tell if it was a boy tortoise or a girl. We examined an actual tortoise shell that had been found in the desert a long time ago. And we looked at the pictures of our little tortoise friend from earlier in the week. We were able to tell that the shell we were looking at was a boy, and the tortoise we had seen Sunday was a girl. The kids thought that was pretty cool. We discussed their life cycle and life expectancy. We talked about reptiles, being cold-blooded, and how to keep cool/warm when they needed to. We talked about diets; and, of course, speed.

When we were done with that, they each got to make their own tortoise "puzzle" and they enjoyed coloring the pieces of the shell. They insisted on my rewriting all the fact onto their tortoises as well.
What they know now:
Seth: The boys have a gular horn that points up, and the girls is flat. They lay their eggs and dig a hole and cover it. They dig burrows and hybernate. Tortoises eat cactuses for water. Some are so big that you could ride on them.
Hannah: You can tell the difference between the girls and boys by looking at their tails, their horns, and their shells. Girl tortoises pee on the ground to make it softer for digging their egg holes. They don't have as many bones as humans. The plates on their shells are called scutes.

Next Week: Fossils.