Wednesday, August 25, 2010

First Week Of School

Well we're off to a pretty good start this year. Wyatt is very excited about "doing school". I have scheduled three days a week to work with him, learning his letters and sounds and numbers. Kelsie is a little overwhelmed with the amount of work that she has had, I think I overscheduled our first day just a little bit. But that is the beauty of homeschool, you can change things as needed. Here are a couple of pictures I took on the first day of school.



Our new science this year is Human Anatomy and Physiology. There is alot more information in this book than the ones we have used in the past. Same author, I guess the subject is just more advanced. But the kids seem to be doing well with it and I think we are really going to enjoy it. Our first little experiment was mummifying an apple. While learning about the history of Anatomy we covered a little bit about how the egyptians had understood alot about the human body, this is exemplified by their method of mummification. We took two apples, peeled both of them, and covered one in a mixture of baking soda and salt. This mixture is similar to the substance that the Egyptians used called natron. The other "control apple" was left uncovered. after a week we took the mummified apple out of the baking soda mixture and compared them. What we found was interesting. The mummified apple was much darker in color, drier and more spongy than the other apple. The "control apple" shrank quite a bit in size compared to the one in the mixture and was quite sticky and almost wet feeling. We realized that this was because the Egyptians knew that to properly preserve a body they needed to extract the moisture from it. It was a pretty cool experiment.
This picture is just after the apples were peeled,
before anything was covered with the mixture.


This picture is one week later, after uncovering
the apple from the natron mixture. The one on
the left is the mummified apple.

This week we have been learning about the anatomy of a cell. The kids are really excited about our experiment for Friday. We are going to make an edible cell. It will include Jello Cytoplasm, M&M mitochondria, Skittle lysosomes, Smarties Golgi Body, Fruit Roll Up endoplasmic reticulum, Nerd ribosomes, twizzler centrioles, and a Jaw Breaker nucleus. Check back after Friday for pictures of it!

2 comments:

  1. Sounds like a cool science...I might check it out for next year! Also, tell Kelsie that great girl minds must think alike because EC has the same binder as her!

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  2. Pretty neat! I may send Ansley over, she has to do a animal cell model! I don't like science!

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