Germs and Micro-organisms

we are conducting two experiments, one of which we finished today

1. Bread  - one wet and in the heat. ---- this is turning brown with white specks
               - one wet and in the fridge ---- nothing is happening to this one

2. Agar
a. we took sampling from our toes
     - the lad's toes grew icky stuff BUT the sample he took from my toes grew worse.
      - the lad's toes grew yellow and white mold, mommy's toes grew black fuzzy mold, white mold, yellow mold and orange mold.
     - the lad's conclusion: is Mommy has to wash her toes more often and wear shoes when she goes outside.

b. Spit and antibiotic
     - spit grew germs!   The  antibiotic didn't grow anything.

c. Two that he rubbed his hands all over.
     - they had germs on them
      - his conclusion: hands need to be washed lots of time

d. Washed hands decently well
     - even if you wash your hands you can still have germs on your hands

e. Mouth swab and toothpaste
    - mouths have germs!!!!   Toothpaste doesn't - except in one spot mommy!   That had a little bit of germs mommy!!   (that might have been contamination)

It was actually quite fascinating seeing the germs grow.
some were black and fuzzy.
some was orange.
much was yellow
and a little bit was a fuzzy white mold that turned yellow when exposed to air

Coursera

This looks interesting.

Online, free courses, from various universities.

Called coursera.

Learning over time

Yesterday we did reading and housecleaning.  We read all our normal books.  Played pirates.  Learned what some valuable things are now-a-days that pirates might want to steal so we've been having pirates stealing art!

Today we spent time on Studyladder.       We worked on sight words, blending, using descriptive language, and what not.  In the afternoon we went for a walk at the dam.  We took a different trail than normal and we spent time looking under stones and deadfall to see what type of insects we could find.  

We seemed to be plum out of luck in finding anything other than the ordinary ants, earthworms, small black spiders and pill bugs UNTIL we stopped to look at a sign and there we saw an interesting bug which obliged us by staying still long enough to be captured in our insect catcher. :)   We want to show the lad who is teaching the bug class during HOPE days tomorrow.

What else?   

OOH.. we had a LOT of fun watching some water spiders

They were sculling back and forth on a stream we came across.  It was the lad who first saw how interesting their shadows were.   The lad had fun experimenting with what he could do to make them come out and play and what would make them go and hide. 

We saw a variety of interesting small flowers coming out to bloom.  Trilliums and dog tooth violets, then these funky little yellow ones that made me think of violas but they weren't, and these white and purple ones that grew together in the same patch.  Haven't a clue what they are called but they inspired comment.  

On an interesting side-note.  Two things have merged in my son's playtime lately.

One. we read the newspaper together at breakfast.    We talk about the news, we sometimes learn from the news (aka the other day we read two different articles that had to do with genetics and research), and of course we read the comics.

Two. Lego city has a website with games on it.  one of those games is a chance to create your own comic strip using lego characters.  This totally captured his imagination and he had SO much fun with it.

The merger:  OH My but the lad is having fun creating tiny newspapers WITH comics strips.  The angry birds are busy doing funny things in their stories, and the borrowers (a movie we've watched recently) are busy telling a story too.   These are multi-day comic strips.   He has news articles and ads and all sorts of things in them.  They are tiny as the lego characters must carry them around, and they are rolled up just as the newspapers are rolled up.  :)  Every once in a while I get the question of "Mommy.. do you think they would write about this in the newspaper?"   My standard answer is "Sure, why not?  They write about all sorts of things." 

Pirates and learning through reading

Before I went out to do the bunnies I opened up a freebie from the folks over at Living books Curriculum.    I had signed up a while back for their newsletter which gets me free stuff once a week.  Anyways the freebie today was modern fairy tales, and we read one called the Box of Robbers.  What a fun story to read to a six year old.  he was quite intrigued. :)

I took care of the bunnies and we had breakfast and then our homeschooling day began.

We started off our day reading the paper.  There were two interesting stories about genetic research so we talked about how our bodies are made of different genetic material and how scientists can work with it to either change something to hopefully make it better OR to test people to see if their bodies will react to medicine in an atypical manner.   It's rather fun using the paper to learn from.  :)

Then we went on to do some reading

we started off with 50 magical stories.  The story today is called the King of the Polar Bears.

in response to the story the lad said "I liked it!"   When asked why he liked it I got the response of "I liked it, mommy, I don't know why I did, but I just liked it!". 

Then we read more about pirates in our world history book.

Today we learned about the pirate base in Port Royal and how many pirates used the island of Madagascar as a base of operations.  We learned abit about the cruelty of Henry Avery.  We took a moment to learn a bit more about him.

then onwards to reading about the red squirrel in the ultimate guide to wildlife of North America.

  The red squirrel    this small squirrel is noisy and highly territorial.   we've seen them at the Pinery and they are a very talkative squirrel.  They are very quick.

On to chapter nine in "the Lamb"

 

it's been good so far going through this book. Today I could see the lad thinking...and that's always a good thing.

He did pages 10-12 in Pirates sticker book.

and pages 6-9 in dressing pirates

yesterday I picked up a pirates megablocks set on sale at Giant Tiger and I promised the lad that once we got finished our pirates work today that we would play pirates for a while.

The set we got is kinda a combination of these two sets...more like the second one than the first...but our characters look like real buccaneers and we have an alligator in our set.  (great for playing peter pan!).  :)   This gave the lad (after looking through the mega-blocks site) that some of our given to us lego was from the pirates sets of megabloks.   So we played pirates.   Always a good way to review the language the pirates used.

Snakes

yesterday was Easter. WE have a tradition in our house whereby I find some small toys and some candies and put them in eggs and hide them about the house. 

This year I found some snakes (three of them) and put them into eggs. One Six year old was thoroughly delighted. 

This of course has led to tons of questions about snakes. He's learned about milking poisonous snakes.
 

He has asked how long it takes for snakes to replenished their venom. And discovered that it takes up to 24 hours for it to be replenished for most snakes, but some snakes it can take longer. 

He's learned how green snakes camouflage themselves in .. green grass. :) And how other snakes can do the same thing.