Science Olympiad

 

This may very well affirm that I am crazy, but getting involved with Science Olympiad is a great project.  Several families in our co-op have decided to put together a Level B (middle school) team.

This is the first year that Science Olympiad has instituted rules specifically aimed to restrict homeschoolers (because we are so nefarious.)  Teams must be composed of students that live in the same or adjacent counties, and cannot be from different states.  This last provision is what is preventing our team from being a full participant this year.  Our co-op, now in its third year, has a family from an adjacent county but in another state (here in New England our states are very close.)  The national office gave an emphatic NO to this arrangement.

The Massachusetts coordinator, thank goodness, has been as accommodating as he can.  He is allowing us to participate as an alternate team, so we are unable to get an official SO medal should we win an event, but we would be awarded a state ribbon.  That's plenty good enough for us since we are unlikely to win anything anyway our first year.  We also could not advance on to the nationals, but with only 7 students (up to 15 are allowed) we could never compete in enough events to earn enough team points to win.

The Science Olympiad has 23 events divided into 3 categories: study, skill, and building.  Almost all the events allow up to 2 team members that work together on the event.  The "study" events involve knowledge to answer test questions.  The "skill" event has several stations in which both questions need to be answered and skills need to be performed.  The "building" events require contraptions to be made before the competition that are impounded that day until the actual demonstration time.

Our team plans to compete in 5 events.  Crime Busters, Food Science, Road Scholar (all skill events), Mission Possible, and Storm the Castle (both building events).  I will blog more about each even as I chronicle our adventure.

Refresh! Midwinter Virtual Conference

Homeschool Connections is brightening up those February doldrums with a free virtual conference!  Each talk is on a different night, lasts about an hour, and starts at 8 pm EST.  You can see the schedule here.  While they are free, you do have to register.

You might be interested in Science by Inquiry on February 1st taught by, well, guess who?

The Catholic Laboratory

The Catholic Laboratory is one of my favorite science resources!  The site is the creation of Ian Maxfield, and his podcast is packed with great information.  He has explored Science from a Catholic perspective in regards to the Origins of Life, the Age of Discovery, and the Theology of the Body, among others.  While subscribing to the podcast will get  them to your readers, visiting the page for each topic will get you links to the information presented.  Visit the downloads section for flyers and presentations about Catholicism and Science.  I highly recommend this great resource.

Planets at Dawn

If you get up early and can get a good view of the Eastern horizon then consider taking a look at this 4-planet show.

Diigo web 2.0

Diigo is a web 2.0 (social network) site designed to share bookmarks and lists.  You may have noticed I used to use Delicious and fed my bookmarks to the sidebar of this blog.  I have found Diigo to be much easier to use and much more powerful.  Besides being able to bookmark and tag websites and feed links to the blog, I am able to create list lists for science subjects like Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Astronomy, Science Interactives, and so forth.  I can add notes to websites that others in my network can see when they visit.  I can even highlight and annotate part of a website and send that to others in the network.  I am also able to create groups, like the At Home Science group I made, to which members can contribute and be emailed the latest posts as they are added, or daily, or weekly.

Diigo also has a very hand toolbar for bookmarking, highlighting and annotating websites.  I have buttons that take me to my library website or displays links in a sidebar.  If the toolbar is too much, you can drag the Diigolet to your links toolbar, then click on it whenever you want to save a website to your Diigo.



If you decide to use Diigo, be sure to follow me and join the group to send and receive great science links.  If you don't join, feel free to browse my public library and lists.

My New Nature Study Blog: A Private Eye Nature

I have been so intrigued by incorporating The Private Eye into a comprehensive nature study that I have created a new blog dedicated to writing about it: A Private Eye Nature.

Admittedly our nature studies have never been much.  For whatever reason I never seemed to be able to make this into something regular and productive.  We love nature walks but never got much beyond that.  Drawing is not a strong suit for Ds#1 or Ds#2; we'll see about Ds#3.  Writing was a struggle for the older two as well until this year when some mystical switch flipped inside them, especially the oldest.  His creative writing has really impressed me!

Using the loupe, writing analogies, drawing, and asking why--the four basic steps--just seemed to make everything else come together.  It gave me a method from which to inspire the art and the writing.  It gave the boys something fascinating and hands-on to do.  I started the blog not just to record our endeavors, but to also write about tips and resources to help others interested in this approach.  Follow along and enjoy!

MIT Edgerton Center Field Trip

If you live anywhere near Cambridge, MA, the Edgerton Center at MIT offers several free LEGO kit science classes. I arranged for our homeschool support group to participate in the Car Rally class because that one allows for the broadest range of ages. Two other moms and I brought in 14 kids; Dh personally escorted us directly to the Center. Here they are heading towards the Infinite Corridor.

Kids were broken up into groups of two and given Lego kits with which they built cars. In order to earn points, they first had to put the cars on a tilt board; the higher the board could be tilted without the car falling off, the more points you got.

Next the kids brought the cars to the track in the hallway. The further the car went, the more points they got. They needed to try the cars both forward and backward--often backward worked much better! Then you went back in to fix your design and try again.

The class ran for 3 hours, including a 30 minute lunch break. Since we all left our lunches in the vehicles we went for 2.5 hours straight through. Only the youngest two showed any signs of wear; the rest we had to almost wrestle parts from their hands!

Amy, the class facilitator, is at the tilt board. Below is the track in the hallway. I highly recommend the classes if you can get 6 or more kids of the right age for them. MIT offers parking passes for $12 per vehicle if public transportation won't work for your group. We bought 3 passes and that was still less than $1 per child. It was well worth the expense.

Immune Attack

Immune Attack is a downloadable game with outstanding graphics, detailed information, and engaging game play about the immune system.

The scenario that you will help a child with Severe Combined Immune Deficiency (SCID) by sending a nanobot, complete with probes, into her blood stream to teach her immune cells how to function again. This is immunology at the molecular level--pathogens, macrophage receptors, transmigration, and more. The immune system information is presented both in written and spoken form. It can be skipped over but not easily since it is integrated in with each mission.

This is a very large file that will take some time and storage to download and install, but that is because of it's amazing graphics. I am amazed at how much my 8 year old can tell me about immune function.

The game was created by the Federation of American Scientists. Below is the trailer on YouTube. One difficulty is that there are no instructions other than what the characters in the game tell you--and they don't tell you how to save the game. It's very frustrating having to start this complex game over again from the beginning each time!

Try Engineering

I found Try Engineering looking for some fun interactive games for my kids on the web. The site is for people interested in engineering careers and so has a lot of information about careers and schools.

Two tabs are of interest in our house. One is the Lesson Plans tab that has a long list of interesting engineering activities for either homeschool or co-op. You can download an 8 page pdf catalogue of all the available plans. The other is the Play Games tab. They have 4 interactive activities produced by the site--Bionic Arm Design Challenge, Questioneering, Design a Parachute, and PowerUp. They also have a good-sized list of other interesting engineering games. I showed this to Ds#2 just before he went to bed and now he can't wait to get on the computer in the morning!

BioEd Online

The latest great science web resource I found is BioEd Online and its companion site, K8 Science. The sites have news, presentations, slides, lesson plans, and teacher resources for biology. While the sites cover relatively few topics in biology, they still have a decent repository of good quality resource available for free.

The sites have a lot of information about laboratory techniques, including a sheep dissection video, measuring and counting with a light microscope, micropipetting, dilutions, and more. K8 includes some physical science topics as well. Despite their limited subject coverage, they have managed to put out quite a bit regarding embryonic stem cells; unfortunately they have no information regarding other sources of stem cells. They have a presentation on cloning, too.

Overall the sites are a great place to look for ideas or to supplement something you may be doing already.

AtHomeScience Yahoo Group

Click to join AtHomeScience

Finally, I have activated the Yahoo Group that I created back when I created this blog. I've added a button to the sidebar if you would like to join. Here is the description:

Everyone is welcome! This group has many Catholic members, including the moderator; as a result, please keep the following in mind:

Please no discussions about "young earth" or "Creationism" and please note if a resource has that perspective. I greatly appreciate families of faith with this perspective; however, information about these resources are available elsewhere, and discussions on this topic tend to get extensive and are without resolution.

Many wonderful secular resources will be discussed, and most of them have no reference to Christianity. Those that do will be discussed in light of their view on Christianity. On some occasions, discussions about Science and Catholicism will take place as well. Any anti-Catholic comments will no be posted.

May this list be a blessing to your own science homeschooling journey!

Geology Study Resources

We are taking up earth science at our house this year, and we are exploring it with our small co-op (3 families, 11 children under age 11, 8 of which are school-aged) We have had a lot of fun so far investigating geology, so I thought I would share some of my resources.

I am using Be Your Own Rock & Mineral Expert by Michele Pinet as our spine. This thin hardcover works well to outline lessons, including activities. It is particularly good at describing techniques and making tools for rock hunting, and then for testing samples. You will need other sources for specific identification. Unfortunately this book is out-of-print and quite expensive; my copy is from our library. This is actually geared to high school kids but it is easy enough to adapt.

I have found several wonderful living science books, most of them written 20 or more years ago. Many of these, however, are still in print and some have even been updated! In fact, the only two on this page that are out of print are the books by Pinet and Selsam.

Some of these are strictly about rocks and minerals while some relate to the rock cycle or the earth's composition. I find it helps kids understand and distinguish igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic rocks. One of our family's favorite authors is Milliscent Selsam, and A First Look At Rocks is no exception. The black and white pictures have obvious limitations, but the writing is just spectacular juvenile science. The book is a great introduction to the three types of rocks and the characteristics of each, so you can go out and start classifying your finds. Her books, unfortunately, are out of print but they are readily available on the used book market. Another favorite of ours are books from the Let's Read and Find Out series; two of them relate to our geology study.

As for actual pictorial identification, rock and mineral books are plentiful on library shelves. We happen to like the Basher Science books because they are so whimsical, the information is in bite-sized pieces, and my kids love to look at them, and the newest addition is Rocks and Minerals: A Gem of a Read.

We have subscriptions to Discovery Streaming, which has many related videos, though I liked the ones from United Streaming that I could link to for free from this neat site about the rock cycle called Rocks to Soil.

We also use Explore Learning, which has some great Gizmos. The Rock Classification Gizmo and the Rock Cycle Gizmo and the Mineral Identification Gizmo all fit right into our study. You can try them for 5 minutes at a time for free each time you visit the site, and Homeschool Buyer's Co-op is currently offering a group buy.

Our little class is about to move on to collecting and testing sample. I even bough a small amount of HCl from Home Science Tools for when we get to mineral identification. I hope the weather doesn't get too cold yet!

UPDATE

How could I forget these three wonderful books (thanks Jennifer!):

Free Museum Day is Approaching

Saturday, September 26th is Museum Day, when loads of participating museums offer free admission. Which one shall we go to the year?

Lesson Planning Web Resources

I've started my lesson planning for next year, so I dusted off some of web sites I find most useful for finding educational material. I find all sorts of lesson plans, animations, interactive sites, video clips, and more through these sites.

I list them all in this post from my homeschool blog Science of Relations.

Happy planning!

Science Logic Curriculum

I recently saw this interesting science series. What intrigues me the most is that it is written by a science-teacher-turned-homeschooler mom that I "run into" at a lot of Charlotte Mason and Classical homeschooling sites.

Makita sees as I do a lack of solid middle school science for homeschoolers that is not written from a Creationist perspective. (It's great that such excellent Creationist material is available, BTW, since you are unlikely to find anything about it at your local library.)

As a result she created Science Logic: Sciences for the Logic Stage. While I have not seen the whole package, she has a free sample download of her first one, Earth Logic, and it looks excellent. You can order it spiral bound, unbound, or as a pdf file. She plans on releasing Life Logic and Physics Logic later in the year. Nice job, Makita!

New Nature Series

I regularly follow two fabulous blogs, In the Sparrow's Nest and Our Journey Westward. These two ladies have launched a fabulous new nature series called NaturExplorers available through their company, Shining Dawn Books.

To celebrate the launch, they are giving away six units from the series. You can enter to win three of them at this post from In the Sparrow's Nest and three of them at this post from Our Journey Westward.

Enjoy!

My dragonfly is the Zome Model of the Month!

I built this last year and it finally made it to publication as the Zome Model of the Month! Looking at a dragonfly made me think of the Golden Ratio, which made me think of Zome, and the rest is history.

I found this to be very interesting on the website:

"If you are a purist, you can skip the supports and suspend the model from monofilament fishing line, as we did in February at our stand in the international toy fair in Nuremberg, Germany."

I'm blushing, guys. The Divine Ratio in Nature recreated in Zome.