curious educator

[knobren]

[StellarStory]

[Theodore]

[knobren]

[knobren]

[StellarStory]

[knobren]

[StellarStory]

[MelN2LilMen]

[knobren]

[learningallthetime]

I'll share a particularly valuable science experience my kids had. They were grade school to almost middle school age at the time. I had been busy with our homebuilding and feeling guilty that not much scientific had happend for awhile, spotted a freshly drowned gopher in the swimming pool, gathered the kids, a disection kit and disposable tray and set to work. (Ok I am a former OR nurse so this was easy for me) they immediately called up a couple of neighbor kids to say "guess what my Mom's doing, come on over" and we proceeded with probably the best science experience ever. Way better than preserved crayfish, fetal pigs etc. For one thing, no formaldehyde smell, and as a drowning victim apparently excess blood was taken up by the lung aveoli? anyway no real mess; a perfect little mammal to examine. We carefully located everything from the optic nerve to intact ureters and cartilage rings on the trachea. She was even pregnant to boot, so we were able to discern differences in size related to twin status vs gestational development of singletons. (gophers have multiple uterine chambers, fascinating)

Point being, science can be addressed creatively without lots of texts and worksheets and will be much more memorable. Incidentally they all took Chemistry at the local jr. college as I didn't want to deal with that in my kitchen, especially with ordering and disposing of chemicals, though they did lots with smaller chemistry kit type things in earlier years.

[keptwoman]

Science is my biggest worry for the highschool years....fortunately I'm a while off worrying about that yet. For now we can cover basic science stuff easily in an informal way, and there are quite a few nice programs if we want to do something more formal.

But highschool

As others have said, materials seem to be predominantly Christian with strong biblical references, and that's not for us.

[knobren]

[Theodore]

[learningallthetime]