Science resources

 Land Animals  is the 6th Apologia Elementary Science book we have gone through, and once again we have LOVED it! We all look forward to Science time, when we snuggle on the couch and I read aloud. We all end up learning so much about God's creation!This time we have found the "Book Extras" website especially helpful, and we have enjoyed watching videos of the animals after we read about them.

  The World Of Animals has been the perfect companion to Apologia's Land Animals.
My children love the cover of this beautiful book, that changes depending on the angle you look at it. This huge, hardcover book is full of beautiful, colorful photographs as well as diagrams that show you inside the animals.It reiterates the information we learned in Apologia's book, and also  gives full credit to God, the creator of all animals with no references to evolution.

My oldest son is actually now too old for the "Elementary" books (and is actually working through Apologia's High School Biology, which he also really enjoys) but he still makes time to listen in to Land Animals  because it is so interesting for all ages.

Next year I will be restarting our elementary science cycle with the younger two children. So we will start over in the order we read them the first time; Flying Creatures, Swimming Creatures, Astronomy, Botany, Anatomy and then Land Animals.
We may somehow fit in the newest elementary book, Physics and Chemistry if we can.

We also have been thoroughly enjoying  the series,  Chemistry 101. 

Ideally we would have watched Biology 101 this year, and I still hope to purchase them soon.  

I won Chemistry in a giveaway, and was planning on leaving them on the shelf until Peter studied Apologia's Chemistry next year, but I kept  hearing wonderful things about the series, and wanted to watch them myself.
They are very entertaining and all of us have enjoyed watching them!

Fun Science

We have done some awesome science experiments this year.

My oldest is a History nut, and my middle son is my Scientist. Those are my 2 favorite subjects, so I am one blessed mama!

 http://www.ordinarylifemagic.com/2010/01/newtons-first-with-raw-eggs.html
(This site has a bunch of super simple experiments)

 We tested the amount of Vitamin C in a bunch of fruits (Apologia Anatomy).

This was from Peter's Apologia Physical Science book.

We also did a bunch from the 2 Adventures With Atoms and Molecules from our library.

And making a homemade light bulb was possibly the best project we have done yet!

 

http://www.stevespanglerscience.com/lab/experiments/build-a-light-bulb-circuit-science

We don't have pictures, but we have also enjoyed exploding a ziplock bag:
http://www.kidspot.com.au/kids-activities-and-games/Science%20experiments+10/Exploding-sandwich-bag+11736.htm

Inflating balloons over water bottles with both yeast,
 http://www.exploratorium.edu/cooking/bread/activity-yeast.html
and baking soda/vinegar.

We did the famous mentos/soda rockets.

 http://www.stevespanglerscience.com/lab/experiments/original-mentos-diet-coke-geyser


And made cornstarch quicksand (From Apologia Elementary Chemistry/Physics)
http://www.stevespanglerscience.com/lab/experiments/quicksand-goo 

And tested surface tension (From Apologia Elementary Chemistry/Physics)
http://www.stevespanglerscience.com/lab/experiments/sink-or-swim-surface-tension 

and if you happen to have some Borax in your house, these crystals are pretty cool:
http://www.stevespanglerscience.com/lab/experiments/magic-crystal-snowflake

And this super easy experiment may be my favorite ever:
http://www.bitesizephysics.com/Experiments/scaredpepper.html

We have actually done many more in the last 3 or so months, but these were some of our favorites.

John James Audubon

We have  made our way through all the Apologia Elementary Science books, and are now starting our cycle again. We will go in the same order as last time, so that my middle  guy will hear everything a second time (he was pretty young when we started the first time around), and my youngest will hear it all for the first time.  The oldest has gone on to high school level Apologia books, but he still enjoys coming in to listen when he can.

So we are back to our very favorite, Flying Creatures. It is amazing how much of what we learned in this book the first time around has become ingrained in our lives. I can absolutely say it was Flying Creatures that inspired a love for nature in me, which then overflowed into my children. Thanks to this book (and the ones that follow), we are all naturalists who love observing and identifying every living thing we can find!

To start off our Flying Creatures study, we spent the summer reading library books about John James Audubon.

My kids have loved learning about Mr. Audubon, and his love for nature.

Owl Pellet

Who knew it would be my 5 year old daughter who wanted to dissect an owl pellet, and not her older brothers.

 

We ordered from HomeScienceTools.com and she had a blast!
And we all learned about the small creatures owls eat!

While we were waiting for USPS to bring our owl pellet, we enjoyed the segment on Dirty Jobs about how owl pellets are collected. 

And then we printed off a few worksheets we found online to help us identify what we found

Bone Chart

and another helpful site

To learn more about birds we highly suggest Apologia's Flying Creatures.

 

Summer Homeschooling

We're currently working through Apologia Botany, and we learned about bees as pollinators today, so we went outside to watch those busy little bees at work!

Egg Explorations

As part of our study of birds using Apologia Flying Creatures we did some fun "egg-periments".

We learned about how strong those shells are, in order to protect the babies growing inside.

We "candled" some eggs to see how fresh they were.

And we dissolved the calcium in the shells with vinegar
(the eggs were boiled before being put in the vinegar or water, we didn't boil  the liquids)

We also compared different kinds of eggs.

 

banty, turkey, duck, store chicken egg, and banty again 

chicken and Coturnix quail eggs

turkey, duck and chicken eggs

and then of course we did a taste test.

We have one more "egg-periment" we are working on that I hope will be the best of all.

Learning about Butterflies

We  learn about butterflies every few years, and here is how we do it in our home. 

We get all the books about caterpillars and butterflies we can from the library, everything from baby books to adult books. And we read them together. These are a couple of the ones we have now:

 

We order caterpillars and watch them grow.

You can see above that they grow so much in just 2 days!
and then even more in only 1 week

We read the chapter on Lepidoptera from our Apologia science book.

We're having so much fun and learning a ton at the same time!

Trying new things: Homeschooling

 There are a few subject where we are ABSOLUTELY loyal to the amazing curriculum we found (Apologia Science, Horizons Math...). But there are a few (language arts-grammar-writing etc)  that we have not found a good fit. I decided this year was the time to buckle down and find what would work.

I had avoided The Well Trained Mind(click link to read part of it online) quite passionately all these years I have been home schooling, simply because "everyone else is doing  it"!  And the ones who tried hardest to sell  me on it added some of their own philosophy when describing it, and that turned me off even more. But I decided to read it after all. And it was surprisingly good. A lot of it is what I have been doing all along, only modified to our family.  I still haven’t read into the 5th grade and beyond chapters, but I was pleasantly surprised at the rest. The rigor demanded would not work for us, but it had some good ideas to mull over.

 Andrew was about to start 1st grade I decided to look into First Language Lessons at the library, and we really liked it, so I  ordered my own copy. The format comes so natural to us and I believe it is exactly what I have been looking for!

I am really excited to finally find an approach that I think will work for us!

We’ve also picked up Memoria Press Copybooks that we are starting as well, to see if I can undo the sloppy handwriting I have allowed Peter to develop, and see if I can head it off before it starts in Andrew!

2014 update:
I LOVE First Language Lessons. I have seen such beautiful fruit from my children memorizing poetry, and the way grammar is presented in this book. I am using it for the second time and absolutely love and recommend it!

I also still love the Memoria Press Copybooks. Abigail is also currently using them, and they are wonderful!