Homeschool World Forum

[Isikole]

What does everyone do for the lab areas in Science curriculum? Is it easy enough to handle at home, and are there kits that one can purchase? I have heard of some private schools offering lab classes, and while that is an option, I'm trying to find out how much can be done at home.

Thanks

[Theodore]

Lab is one of the few things you may be forced to do at a local community college, rather than at home. The equipment just costs too much otherwise, though some homeschool group with a lot of high school-aged children do pool their resources and set up a lab. Check your area and see what your options are.

If you are going to buy lab materials, I highly recommend Edmund Scientific.
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[Josh]

Check out late night labs its an online program you work on through a web browser. Alpha Omega Academy uses it and charges about $50 I believe, that is what I used.
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[Ramona]

Pray. Someone in our local group decided to offer a bio lab just when our two oldest needed it. A friend at church offered a summer science lab for elementary ages when one of our children was needing to learn experimenting. My DH decided he could offer a chem lab in our kitchen if everyone else who signed up would split the cost of the materials. It worked out great.

Ramona

[trose_87]

We use Home Science Tools to buy products for labs. You can get what you need by going to a specific curriculum you use and they will show you what you need for that curriculum of Science or you can buy what you want. It works for us.

[Guy Vandegrift]

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http://faculty.valpo.edu/gvandegr/
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[StellarStory]

In my areas, I can find labs in Zoo's, Science Museums, Co-ops, Private School teachers providing after hours classes, Individuals giving classes in their homes, Cover Schools and Duel Enrollment in Colleges are all ways of getting lab sciences if you don't want to deal with it yourself at home.

I happen to believe it wouldn't cost that much to do labs a home. You just need to select the lab projects you want to do carefully.

Right now, for instance, we are doing an experiment on tooth decay. I bought nothing for this. We used clear glasses and dipped into our store of baby teeth. We then labeled the glasses. We put into them liquids we thought would and would not affect the teeth.

The kids had to write up a protocol for the experiment. They had to make predictions. Now we will observe for a while. At the end they will write up the results and the conclusion.

In addition my 10th grade kid is taking a lab at a local science museum in biology.

Stellar

[Guy Vandegrift]

I agree that there is no reason to spend money on expensive laboratory equipment. I have taught college physics labs for many years, and students are always surprised that we deliberately use faulty equipment. The reason is that we want students to think about errors in measurement (called "experimental error" or "uncertainty"). Expensive equipment doesn't make experimental error go away, it just makes it smaller. But the process of analyzing big errors is almost exactly the same as the process of analyzing small errors.

Furthermore "important" measurements are often subject to large errors. About 15 years ago, it was common to see (non-biblical) estimates of the age of the universe that range from 10 to almost 20 billion years.
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Want to do genuine research in your home?
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[Theodore]

The problem is that the various dating methods are each only good for a certain time range, so to pick the "right" dating method, you have to first assume something about the object you're dating. So the dating methods may be scientific, but the choice of dating methods is not, therefore the resulting dates are not scientific either. Also, you have to assume that your constants are actually constants - that you know how much of the substance the rock started with, and that none of the substance was leached out.

Fresh rock is often dated at thousands or as much as hundreds of thousands of years old, and the same rock can be taken to 10 different laboratories under blind test conditions and you'll get back 10 widely different dates. Evolutionists generally just throw out the "bad" dates and keep the ones that are inside the range they assumed to start off with.
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The board game has sold over 350,000 copies worldwide, garnered many awards, is used by over 2,000 schools, and is used extensively by homeschoolers.

[suzie]

When I was in (home) high school, I took two semesters of science at a local college (happened to be a private college with a program for local high school seniors) and really enjoyed it- they were subjects like biology that I had already taken in a homeschool curriculum, but were reinforced and had the lab component I hadn't had the first time around. The nice thing was that the credits transferred when I got to college, leaving two fewer classes for me to take... kind of like public schoolers who go in with AP credits. Looking back I wish I had done more college courses in high school, since it worked out so conveniently.

[jenniferGWOTW]

We're going to use a mixture of "virtual" labs (online) and at home labs by buying lab kits and study guides. It will be interesting to see how it all turns out. I expect to pay $100 - 200 for science this year.
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[knobren]

Virtual labs, animations:

http://nobelprize.org/educational_games/medicine/
http://www.hhmi.org/biointeractive/vlabs/
(also has webcast science lectures)
http://www.explorelearning.com/
http://www.hazelwood.k12.mo.us/~grichert/sciweb/applets.html
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/tryit/dna/
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/teachers/activities/3116_stoneage.html
http://www.mypyramidtracker.gov/
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/rxforsurvival/series/teachers/pdf/rx_guide_back2basics.pdf
http://biologylab.awlonline.com/
http://www.okc.cc.ok.us/biologylabs/index.htm
http://www.phschool.com/science/biology_place/labbench/
http://highered.mcgraw-hill.com/sites/0072437316/student_view0/online_labs.html
http://www.dnalc.org/ddnalc/resources/animations.html
http://www.biology.arizona.edu/site.html
http://ehrweb.aaas.org/ehr/books/contents.html


Mostly cheap, mostly do-it-yourself labs:
http://chem.lapeer.org/Bio1Docs/Index.php


Greenhouse emissions calculator:
http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/emissions/ind_calculator.html

Science videos online:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/teachers/video/

Cancer animations:
http://www.insidecancer.org/

[knobren]

It also doesn't hurt to ask someone from a local university if they can spare the odd item...a couple of sprigs of Elodea, some dialysis tubing, etc. Try to contact a lab coordinator or stockroom person. Or if you know a faculty member from church, sports, etc., ask her/him about it.

[knobren]

http://cse.ssl.berkeley.edu/AtHomeAstronomy/
http://www.yesmag.bc.ca/projects/projects.html
http://www.sciencemadesimple.com/
http://www.geocities.com/TelevisionCity/Set/4567/ex.html
http://wings.avkids.com/Curriculums/Forces_Motion/
http://www.ncsu.edu/sciencejunction/terminal/imse/lowres/index.htm
http://www.ncsu.edu/sciencejunction/station/experiments/EGG/egg.html
http://scifun.chem.wisc.edu/HOMEEXPTS/HOMEEXPTS.html
http://amasci.com/home.html
http://www.spartechsoftware.com/reeko/MoreExperimentsSortCategory.htm

[StellarStory]

Great resources!

Thanks so much!