Elementary Science

On Friday’s I teach some classes for students in our school. One of my favorites is elementary science. This year we are working through a great book published by Apologia called Exploring Creation with Zoolology 2: Swimming Creatures of the Fifth Day. (I highly recommend this entire series…fabulous.) This Friday we were doing a series of experiments to use for our Open House at the end of the month.

Here the girls are getting our sand ready….

Our experiment involved testing where the best fossils would be formed. We used sand, dirt (mud…the boys were a little over-enthusiastic with the water) and clay. Then we took a shell with a lot of ridges and made depressions in each of our materials. Plaster of Paris was quickly (we weren’t quick enough and had to make a second batch) pored into the depressions…and in a mere 30 minutes we could pull out our ‘fossils’ and see if our hypothesis was correct .

Here Garret (really cute guy that you can’t see) is pushing our shell into the mud.

Here Linda is working quickly to get the Plaster of Paris in place.

Shark Dissections

A group of our High School students decided they wanted to do a Marine Biology Course this year. All of these students have finished a traditional Biology course, and two of them are taking Chemistry concurrently with this class. We have had a lot of fun, this is a fascinating topic. Here is one of our dissections…we also did star fish and clams. Enjoy the pics.

Getting through the tough skin is more of a challenge than you would think…after breaking some dissection tools we resorted to steak knives.

Here is Joseph abandoning tweezers and tools in favor of fingers…can’t be to squeamish.

Hands on learning isn’t just for the little kids…. And yes that is a tie around Brad’s head. We don’t try to explain Brad’s fashion quirks, we just enjoy them.