Wednesday, September 25, 2013

She blinded me with...

SCIENCE! OK that was dorky. Sorry. :)

Aaaaanyway --- today's post is indeed about Science.  I will readily admit that Science, especially Biology, is not my cup of tea.  I did not enjoy dissecting a worm (all I can remember about that is I smashed the poor thing's gonads when I sliced it open), and I can will never forget the scent of formaldehyde along with the image of someone making their frog do a funny dance, when we were doing THAT exciting lesson. Blech.  I have always been much more interested in the "why" rather than the "how", when it comes to humans and animals.  What I mean by that is -- I'd much rather dissect (ew) someone's behavior and figure out what past events or hereditary traits are causing their current state than delve into their brain and talk about neurons and DNA and zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz...  And on the flipside from boredom, hearing about someone's broken finger or sprained ankle or, heaven forbid, WOUND (just typing that word made my wrists go weak and I had to stop typing for a moment) makes me have to put my head between my knees.  In my mid-20s, I had to bring my mother along with me to my pre-tonsillectomy doctor's appointments because when he started talking about what they would do, I turned green and the world turned fuzzy.  They even had to pull out the smelling salts at one point.  In summary, Kiki + Biology = no bueno, and being a nurse or doctor was never on my list of dream jobs.

However, I did always think it would be cool to be a storm tracker.  And earth sciences are pretty darn interesting.  Tectonic plates, earthquakes, volcanoes --- COOL. (or hot, really, I suppose)  The stars, planets, space -- also cool.  So I'm not totally a buzzkill about the sciences. :)  Just the ones that deal with innards, I guess.

My dad was a Chemist and now my brother is, too.  Chemistry can be interesting - cool experiments and analyzing, figuring out how many electrons are needed for bonding, etc (I love math, so I did enjoy all of that) - so I thought we would start with a Chemistry program I found online.  We dove right in and.... Snoozefest 2013.  Buggy did find the basics of it interesting -- what matter is, atoms, thinking about how tiny they must be -- all that good stuff.  But then... eyes glazed over.  For both of us, frankly.  The experiments and lessons are pretty dry. In my opinion, more for 5th grade than K-4.  Sooo -- we finished our lessons about matter, atoms, and bonds, memorized some terms, and then shut the book (literally) on that one.

We are now doing something much more exciting and FUN! Our homeschool group has a Science Club.  September was all about Weather. So - we kept a weather journal at home with the high temps, the wind direction, the barometric pressure, and the rainfall.  We looked at the journal and discussed any trends we noticed.  We poked around online and talked about earthquakes and tornadoes.  We watched some tsunami and flooding footage.  I showed Bug all the stuff about tectonic plates and fault lines.  Then, we went to our Science Club on Monday, and Bug made a tornado using two 2-liter bottles. So. AWESOME.

See the cute & tiny tornado?

Of course, it's glittery blue water, which makes it even more epic. :)

The kids also made lightning and thunder and learned about rain, and it was just all around pretty darn cool. The conversations that these kids had while doing everything were really neat.  I was glad we had learned about electrons, because there was discussion about electrons inside clouds in the lightning group.  Buggy was able to put together what she had learned with this and it made sense to her. :)

October is all about Animals, so Bug is a bundle of excitement about that!! In the weeks leading up to that next meeting, we are going to learn about animal classifications and habitats, and do all sorts of fun things.

Because Science = SUPER AWESOME FUN at the Cactus Schoolhouse. :)

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