Seven Wonders of the Microbe World

This 25 minute video is a compilation of 7 others highlighting science and microbes produced by The Open University.  You can watch each individual video on YouTube or click below to watch them all.

 


The topics are:

• The History of Beer
• Black Death
• Food Preservation
• Nitrogen Fixation
• Antibiotics
• Genetic Engineering (plants)
• Life on Mars

Dissection for Co-op and zeroBio

I am teaching a dissection class during our short 6-week winter session for our homeschool co-op. The class is for 9 and up and I had a whopping 9 students sign up, ages 9 to 14.

Home Science Tools offers complete kits for a class like this. We decided to use the Intermediate Kit with seven specimens, pictured here.

The dissection guides will lead even the most novice of students through the process, including small black-and-white photos of the anatomy. I am there to clarify things, help with technique, put each specimen into a classification perspective, and often giving comparisons to human anatomy.

Our kits had not arrived in time for our first class, so I took the time to go over the tools in a dissection kit (my own.) Next I did a quick search for dissection videos and came across zeroBio, a great interactive site with some dissection videos and a lot of other resources.

My students really liked the videos and they prepared them for what was to come. This week they all enthusiastically dissected their earthworms and are looking forward to next week. They're a great bunch!

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.

Stokes Bird Guide

I really like this pocket-sized, concise bird guide. Despite it's diminutive size, I have easily identified all the birds in our yard. it is organized by bird color, making it very easy to use.

We have a window feeder with a one-way glass that allows us to observe the birds up-close. Here's a sample of the common visitors to our feeder:

Optical illusion

Most optical illusions take advantage of how the brain encodes visual information presented to it from the eyes. This one looks like Einstein up close and like Marilyn Monroe at a distance or even from an angle. It all depends on focus.

This image came from a forwarded email; source is unknown.

Microscope fun

Certainly by the time your child is doing high school level biology, you're going to need a microscope; I wouldn't wait until then, though. Originally I bought my microscope when I was teaching a high school biology for our homeschool co-op, but my children have gotten so much fun out of it that I would suggest you get one sooner. Getting out the microscope is a guaranteed afternoon of fun in our house.

Be sure to have plenty of slides and cover slips, available at Home Science Tools. One thing that make exploration easier for novices is prepared slides. The Complete Elementary Slide Set has a great variety of specimens.

Two great beginner books to go along with your microscope are Greg's Microscope and Janice VanCleave's Microscopes and Magnifying Lenses. (Enter micoscope* in the Search My Books at LibraryThing box in the right sidebar to display these books. You'll also see The Usborne Complete Book of the Microscope, which is visually beautiful but without many more home microscope activities than Greg's Microscope.)

A very simple (and smelly) activity is stuffing a handful of grass into a jar, covering it with pond water and a lid, and letting it sit for 3 to 5 days, making sure to open the lid daily. Put a drop of that water on a slide, cover it with a cover slip, and check out the active microorganisms.

Cow's eye dissection

Blood and Guts is a great book for 9 to 12 year olds to study human anatomy and physiology. It's inexpensive, fun, and filled with all sorts of activities, like a cow's eye dissection. Today I dissected cows' eyes with a 10 and 11 year old, who have been using Blood and Guts for science this past year, and two 8 year olds (one of which was my son) that happened to be interested. This is an easy and inexpensive dissection for beginners since most parts are very easy to identify and not very delicate. You can get everything you need from Home Training Tools (see links section) including the eyeball and guide, though we found a way to save some money. I suggest you get the dissection kit and tray, costing $15 combined (these are reusable) from HTT. You can throw in the eyeball for an additional $2.50 or you can, like we did, call a local slaughter house and get them for free. The fall is the best time when the slaughter house is the busiest--we were lucky to get 4 over two days this week. Since they are fresh you don't need to worry about any formaldehyde or it's accompanying smell. Dissection guides are readily available for free online. Here's just one:

http://www.exploratorium.edu/learning_studio/cow_eye/index.html

The kids all did a great job, and the dissection helped the older kids to better understand and remember the anatomy and even some of the physiology. The mess wasn't too bad to clean, either.