Blood and Guts

For science this winter and spring, we are using Blood and Guts: A Working Guide to Your Own Insides by Linda Allison. This is A Brown Paper School book, a series that also includes some great math titles like Math for Smarty Pants, The I Hate Mathematics! Book, and The Book of Think.

Blood and Guts covers the major body systems and has a nice handful of experiments and activities to do, including dissections. The physiology is good, though the simple line drawings don't really capture anatomy well.

I am pairing this up with The Body Book by Donald Silver. This book is filled with reproducible pages to be used to make large organ models. This book better covers anatomy, especially if you decide against dissection. It has more activities and some physiology as well.

Together they make a nice middle school human body unit.

Ursids burst

This is for you night owls in the northern hemisphere. Ursids is an annual even causing a few shooting stars to come from within Ursa Minor. This year, however, the show could be spectacular in the earliest hours of Dec. 23. Ursa Minor remains above the horizon in the northern hemisphere for the entire night, thus the event cannot be seen from the southern hemisphere.

Here is a NASA article about it. It predicts the most likely time to see the 8P/Tuttle debris, shed in 1405, is 0229 EST. Here is more information from Meteor Showers Online. If it wasn't so incredibly cold up here I might consider getting up for the event, but don't hold your breath.

On the west coast it will only be 11:30 pm on the 22nd and probably a bit warmer, though my sources in WA tell me it has actually snowed out there too!

Ice storm

What happens when a southern rain storm meets a northern cold front right over New England? You lose power for 6 days. I am certainly glad my husband bought that generator 15 years ago so we could have heat, light, and refrigeration, sometimes even water (when we shut everything else off.)

It was like luxury camping with no packing and a real bed. Still, I think I would like to schedule things like that.

Now we are getting a foot of the ol' fashioned white stuff. White Christmas anyone?

The ice storm caused quite a bit of damage, but a bit of beauty as well:

Game Review posted for Totally Gross

I just posted my review of Totally Gross! The Game of Science at Games for Homeschooling.
The boys and I certainly laugh a lot and learn quite a bit of trivia playing this game. It does have a good measure of the gross and impolite.

The game ends with a little hands-on experiment, I feature I really like. Today, ds#1 had to weigh himself and figure out how much he would weigh on the moon (the card tells you that it would be 1/6th of your weight on Earth.)

As you will see on my gaming blog, I gripe a bit about the cheap components of educational games. I buy many other board games in the $20 price range with far more durable and aesthetically nicer parts, and they are more interesting games to play. Unfortunately, we pay for the educational value alone, which, in some cases, can be achieved with a home made game for far less money. I can't imagine writing up all those trivia questions, though.

Butterfly Award

Rockhound Place awarded this to me--thank you so much!

Here are the rules for this pass-it-along award:

1. Link to the person who gave you the award.
2. Post the graphic.
3. Pass the award on up to ten other bloggers whose blogs you consider cool.

Here is my list of 8 cool blogs that (mostly) are "small" in that they don't have thousands of visitors each month and dozens of followers. May they all some day be so blessed!

1. Adventures on Beck's Bounty
2. Alasandra's Homeschool Blog
3. Tonya's ...Everything I've Got
4. Laura's Four Little Monkeys
5. Prince Andrew and the Queen Mum's Growing Fruit...part 2
6. Shez's Homeschooled Twins, the host of Cool Homeschoolers
7. Cheryl's Talking to Myself
8. Jessica's Trivium Academy