Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Fun Science?

A few months ago I asked Seth what he thought his favorite subject in school was. He surprised me by saying Science. I am not a fan of science and for the past four years have not done much with it because talented science-loving moms have showered by kids with knowledge and experiments each week at Co-op. Well this year we are not doing co-op so science rests again on me.

We are very excited to be using Apologia's 'Human Anatomy and Physiology' curriculum. I decided to splurge and bought both kids the Anatomy Notebooking Journal and boy am I glad I did. What a wonderful resource with most of the projects all ready for us to just cut out and use or fill in and make notes. It makes my prep time effortless.
These past few weeks we have been studying about the Anatomy of a Cell. Sounds kind of boring but we have had a lot of fun with it. I am surprised how much we are actually remembering. Our favorite part of the cell is probably the Golgi bodies which we pronounce googlie bodies. Yes, it probably isn't proper science etiquette to rename scientific labels but we just think it sounds better!

Our study ended this week with a fun and tasty "edible cell" project. We used yellow jello and then all different kinds of candy to represent the different organelles that you would find in your cells. Relatively painless and we still have smiles on our faces.
If we continue to have this much fun I might just enjoy doing Science this year!

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Our Garden

This summer wasn't even a summer here in Montana. I think we had a whole 6 weeks of warm weather. Lots of rain, which my garden loved and is still loving but soon the frost will come and my garden will be history. We have only managed to get a few zucchini, one or two tomatoes and as you can see a lot of pumpkins, which will be ready for Halloween.

Louie says that for the small amount of stuff we have actually produced it hasn't really been worth it. It seems to me that our bees were a little lax this year because things got cross pollinated or didn't do much after flowering. Do we need to start self pollinating?