Showing posts with label homeschool science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label homeschool science. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 19, 2024

The Most Comprehensive Solar Eclipse Unity Study for Homeschoolers


Because if there is one thing that I am great at after homeschooling for 14 years, it is making a comprehensive unit study for homeschoolers!

My favorite thing about creating a unit study around an upcoming event is that the entire world becomes your hype man. Kids pick up on how excited everyone is about the eclipse, and learning more about it becomes just another way to engage with that excitement, mwa-ha-ha! 

What you see before you is THE most comprehensive solar eclipse unit study for homeschoolers. Almost all of it can be leveled up and down, usually just about simultaneously so you can work with your kids of different ages together. Pick and choose what you've got the time and materials for, interspersing activities you know your kids will love with activities that will stretch their skills and interests a little. 

Anchor Charts, Infographics, and Other Decorations

Because when you homeschool, even your decorations are educational!


solar eclipse bunting. Sew this from stash fabric and upcycled blue jeans. 

free printable easy reader book. If you've got a kid on the cusp of independent reading, you know the pain of keeping them in those teensy books! There can never be enough! Well, here's one more!
image credit: NASA/Tyler Nordgren

NASA posters and graphics. This poster is a good US Geography resource for a middle-grade kid to use to trace the eclipse's path on a map. The back of this poster is an excellent anchor chart to use with any age to inspire further research.

printable map of the Moon. Use this with binoculars or a telescope to identify the Moon's features, or simply display it because it's pretty!

solar eclipse diagrams. They're a little dry, which in my home makes them perfect for taping to the wall directly facing the toilet in the kids' bathroom. Ahem.

April 8 Eclipse Activities

Do these activities during the partial phase of the eclipse.


Are your eclipse glasses safe? Okay, do this one BEFORE April 8! My town is getting a total solar eclipse, and so eclipse glasses are EVERYWHERE right now. I love that, but I do NOT love how I've seen some of those glasses being stored and handled by the places offering them. PRETTY PLEASE triple-check your eclipse glasses well before the eclipse, have extras on hand in case of accidents, and store them so super carefully to keep them from scratches. 

Eclipse Soundscapes project. This Citizen Science project is a great way to encourage all ages to be mindful and present during the eclipse, as well as to document their observations. If you don't want to do something this formal, you can simply talk about being observant with all the senses during the eclipse, then have kids write--ideally the same day!--about the eclipse using as much multi-sensory detail as possible. Younger kids can draw their observations and impressions.

GLOBE Eclipse Citizen Science Project. If you're in a country that will experience the eclipse, you can use the GLOBE Observer app to record observations and meteorological measurements during the eclipse. Elementary kids can do this with family help, while middle and high schoolers can work more independently. For a longer meteorology study, use the GLOBE Observer app regularly. This project would work as a lab for a high schooler wanting to study Astronomy and earn a Lab Science credit on their high school transcript.

pinhole projector. This NASA one is a little overengineered, but the experiment they suggest would keep younger kids busy and engaged during the partial phase of the eclipse. Here's a more basic one that's more than sufficient for your purpose--my kids have made this kind, and it works great!

Art and Craft Projects

Because if you're not doing a weird and unwieldy craft project, are you even homeschoolers?


image credit: xkcd

Aztec Sun Stone drawings. This slightly guided, mostly creative art project is a sun-themed craft that works with a history/geography study of the Aztec people. If you didn't want to dedicate a huge amount of time to the study (but you still wanted that cute sun craft for eclipse decor!), you could get away with reading a couple of picture books or documentary clips, as long as the importance of the Sun Stone was covered.

chalk and construction paper solar eclipse. The easiest and best model that a kid can make of a solar eclipse is also the cheapest! I'm trusting you as a homeschooler to have chalk and construction paper in your house.

coffee filter partial eclipse. I wouldn't go purchasing a set of coffee filters just for this project, but if you've already got them on hand, go for it! Add some more interest and sensory art experience by having the kids color the filter not with crayon, but with washable marker, then let them drip water from an eyedropper to watch the ink bleed. 

cupcakes. This is the easiest and cutest eclipse treat I've seen yet, and it's pretty accurate-looking, too! Even young kids can help with these, and older kids can simply up the independence-level, and/or bake the cupcakes completely from scratch.

glow-in-the-dark solar eclipse T-shirt. Because who doesn't love an excuse to play with glow-in-the-dark paint?

moon map for coloring. My kids had SO MUCH FUN one week when I printed and assembled this Moon map, taped it to my wall, and invited them to color on it with markers. 

mosaic sundial image via Marvelously Messy

mosaic sundial. You can incorporate this into the sundial lesson in the Astronomy section, below, but especially if you've got younger homeschoolers, it's totally okay to just make this simple (but beautiful!) sundial together as a family and have a fun summer exploring how it works. Learning how to mosaic is actually a surprisingly accessible skill even for younger kids, and you might find yourself with a whole new Mosaic Special Interest.

solar eclipse cake. Marshmallow fondant is shockingly easy to make, so other than the difficulty coloring it (I've never found a good black food coloring, so tbh I'll probably just buy some pre-dyed fondant), this entire cake is dead easy. My teenager and I are going to make this for our own solar eclipse guests, but I'll probably do a Victoria sandwich and skip the habanero...

solar eclipse sandwich. Even younger kids should be able to make this eclipse sandwich layout mostly independently, and it's a great way to encourage them to try a couple of perhaps new-to-them foods. 

Sun, Moon, and Earth masks. Get out the cardboard and the paints to make these giant masks with the kids... then send them outside to chase each other in them!

total eclipse tostadas. My kids LOVE themed meals! We'd make an entire spread of eclipse-themed food and then eat it while watching a nerdy NASA documentary.

Astronomy Activities, Crafts, Games, and Resources

This time period around the eclipse is the BEST time to get a kid excited about astronomy, not to mention make memories of this special, once-in-a-homeschool-education opportunity.



cookie Solar System. If you're learning about the Moon and the Sun, you might as well learn about the entire Solar System! This activity is suitable for preschoolers through high schoolers, with scaffolding for younger kids and more detail, creativity, and independent calculations and research encouraged in older kids.

If they're not doing science with dirty fingernails, how do you know they're homeschoolers?

Investigating prisms. This is a great time to dive into everything sunlight. The youngest homeschoolers can enjoy process-oriented, experiential play with prisms, while older kids can start to learn about the science of light refraction. Middle schoolers can develop their own experiment, and high schoolers can write that experiment up in the Astronomy Lab Notebooks for a lab science credit in their transcripts.

Moon journal. The most educational way is to have kids make their own from scratch by tracing a bottle cap into their observation journal or onto a piece of paper, but here's a printable template if you'd rather have a leg up. Have them sketch the Moon's phase every night and record the date, time, and weather. Incorporate a simple meteorology study by also having a kid record the temperature, air pressure, wind speed, etc. Kids can make DIY versions of all those measuring tools, or you could splurge on a simple weather monitoring tool.. or a fancy one!


paper telescope models. These paper models are quite fiddly, so I wouldn't even offer them to anyone other than the craftiest of high schoolers. My kid was practically born with a craft knife in her hand, and even SHE found them tricky! But if you've got a mechanically-minded kid who's very interested in the instruments of astronomical observation and exploration, it can be worth even making these yourself so that they can have a tactile representation of these instruments. The models aren't so delicate that younger kids couldn't incorporate them into their small-world play.


phases of the Moon demonstration and model. THIS is how you teach the phases of the Moon to kids of every age! The Oreo model is just for fun, but the prospect of making it is very good incentive to attend to the lesson, ahem. And here's a similar worksheet to keep them busy during their sibling's gymnastics lesson...

phases of the Moon flip book. Here's another great way to give kids an understanding of how the Moon waxes and wanes, especially if you can bring them outside regularly to watch it happen for themselves. You can make this flip book for the youngest kids to enjoy, but kids even a little older can help with assembly, and even older kids can use this as a jumping-off point for a flip book or animation study. My younger kid went through a HUGE DIY flip book phase when she was little!

Planet Hunters TESS Citizen Science Project. High schoolers can help scientists discover exoplanets by analyzing images from the TESS mission to look for eclipses of other stars. The project is technically complete as of right now, but does expect to obtain more data to analyze. This would work as a lab for a high schooler wanting to study Astronomy and earn a Lab Science credit on their high school transcript.

sidewalk chalk Solar System model. In the lead-up to the 2017 eclipse, my kids researched each planet and drew its picture on a labeled index card, then taped the cards to popsicle sticks. One beautiful afternoon, we headed out on our straight city-wide walking trail and we measured and placed the planets in their correct spots along the trail. It was just as fun walking back to the car, because instead of being tired and cranky, the kids kept racing ahead to find and reclaim their planets! SUCH a good way to reinforce a sensorial understanding of measurement AND astronomy!

solar eclipse foldables. For those whose kids love lapbooks and mini books, I've got you! These fill-in-the-blank infographics are also helpful for kids to use as illustrations when they write paragraphs or essays about the eclipse. This mini book is better for younger kids, who can sneak in a little scissors practice, too, mwa-ha-ha!

Solar Jet Hunter Citizen Science Project. High schoolers look for and mark solar jets to help scientists understand this phenomenon. This would work as a lab for a high schooler wanting to study Astronomy and earn a Lab Science credit on their high school transcript.

Solar oven. Even the littlest homeschoolers can help make a solar oven that will melt a s'more! Add a hot dog solar oven for a complete camping meal. Don't do this pizza box oven, though, because it's kind of crap. Older kids can do their own experimentation and engineering, and if you're really serious about it, you can invest some time and money into making an absolutely superb solar oven that will properly cook food.

sundials. Shadows are an accessible way to introduce any age of homeschooler to a study of the Sun, and kids who are studying shadows LOVE to make sundials! There are a million ways to make a sundial, from the preschooler-friendly to these more sophisticated papercrafts

Sungrazer Citizen Science Project. This project is for high schoolers or very interested middle schoolers. In it, you scan through images of the Sun taken by the SOHO Observatory, looking for previously undiscovered comets! This would work as a lab for a high schooler wanting to study Astronomy and earn a Lab Science credit on their high school transcript.


Sun prints. All you need is a pack of cyanotype paper to make the coolest prints and shadow art! When we did that set above, way back in preparation for the 2017 eclipse, we were all fascinated by the way the sun print plus the shadow print of the rectangular prism made a perfect cube on the paper. If your kids (or you!) are extra crafty, you can even buy cyanotype FABRIC! To add some academic rigor, combine sun prints with this free worksheet set

word searches. I recently reintroduced word searches to my Girl Scout troop, and they were all super into them! I feel like we as a people don't do enough analog puzzles these days, sigh. Here's a pre-made set of word searches, but you can also have kids make their own with graph paper as a template. 

History, Geography, and Social Studies Activities, Crafts, Games, and Resources

Learn about the cultural significance of eclipses around the world and throughout time.


Again with those dirty fingernails! I'm pretty sure that was the year that I put a nail brush in her Easter basket...

gingerbread Stonehenge. This is a delicious way to study ancient astronomy and the importance of the Sun to our ancestors. To be sure, it's not the most academically rigorous project, but it makes a fun capstone to a short unit on Stonehenge and its astronomical purpose.

track the path of the eclipse. Make, print, or buy a line map of the United States, then help kids use their resources to trace the path of the eclipse. Depending on the kids' interest levels, this can be the spine for an entire US geography study.

Video of Navajo and Cherokee teachings. It's probably a little too dry for the youngest homeschoolers, but if you engage with the video along with your kids you could make it fun for kids who are a little older, and middle and high school kids ought to be fine.

 

 

Cool Stuff to Buy

If you've got a little extra room in your homeschool budget, splash out with these educational materials that will encourage and expand your kids' interest.

  • glass prism set. Younger kids can spend years playing with these, exploring rainbows and shadows and angles and light. Now that my kids are grown (sob), I've made little macrame hangers to put them in all my sunny windows so I can still enjoy them!
  • planet stickers. My kids loved these even into high school! I let them place them (in planet order, of course!) on the wall of our long front hallway, and it's a decoration that we still all enjoy. I mean, if you don't have giant stickers of all the planets in order in your front hallway, how will your guests know that you're homeschoolers?
  • Moon sticker. We had to put this in a different room from the planet stickers, obviously, because otherwise the scale would be wrong.
  • star stickers. Kids do not seem to know about star stickers these days, because every kid I've ever showed them to has been SO EXCITED--especially when I explain that they go on your bedroom ceiling! My own homeschooler, as a high schooler studying astronomy, actually used star stickers to put all the major constellations all over the walls and ceilings of our entire house. It's kind of my favorite thing!
  • sunprint paper. Explore shadows or make awesome art.
Okay, that basically encompasses everything that a homeschooler needs to know about eclipses! My kids wouldn't even tell you that they particularly love astronomy, but I know that our eclipse units have been among our all-time favorite homeschool studies. I mean, we got to watch these amazing astronomical occurrences FOR SCHOOL!

Your kids are going to love these activities, too.

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Tuesday, January 2, 2024

How My High School Girl Scout Troop Earned the (*cough, cough* unofficial *cough*) Harvest Badge


Yes, we made up another Girl Scout badge.

I'm telling you, though, that if you've got a troop of older kids, especially Seniors and Ambassadors like I do, and you're not letting them make up badges, then you're sleeping on some of the best girl-led experiential learning that Girl Scouts offers!

Because if you've got a troop of older kids, I know you know that the official GSUSA badge offerings for those age groups suuuuucks. I'd way rather have a bunch of happy and engaged kids flouting the Girl Scout Badge Police than I would a bunch of bored kids reluctantly working through that same dang Robotics badge for the umpteenth time (Seriously, GSUSA? Three Robotics badges per level? At EVERY level?!? And they're all pretty much the same?!? Please hire me to revamp your badges I will do such an awesome job I swear). 

Anyway... during last Spring's budget/planning meeting my Girl Scouts got super revved up about this cute Harvest badge design--


--and decided that they wanted to earn it this autumn. And so we did!

The kids decided on most of the activities, and I fine-tuned them and sneaked in a few more educational bits. Our local council is also offering an Apple Quest fun patch this season (similar to the one I listed here), so I also bought those and we added in some more apple-themed activities to our plans.

Here are our activities!

Research apple varieties; taste-test apples.


For our apple pie meeting, each Girl Scout was asked to bring approximately five pounds of one apple variety, a small serving plate, and an informational label that they'd researched and created for that variety. 

At the start of the meeting, every Girl Scout sliced one of her apples (giving me a good chance to observe and make sure that they all had appropriate knife skills for our upcoming tasks) and displayed it on its serving plate, then we went around the room and each Girl Scout spoke about her apple variety while we all tasted it. Every apple variety was purposefully bred, so it was interesting to hear what characteristics each variety was supposedly bred for--and if we agreed! The kids also quickly noticed that the apple varieties browned differently, so that was interesting, too.

Make apple pie filling; make homemade pie crust; bake an apple pie; learn to decorate a pie.


As you can tell from the heading, this step accomplished a few of the required activities for the Harvest badge and the Apple Quest fun patch. The Girl Scouts were most excited about baking a pie and decorating it, and since apple pie filling is dead simple and my teenager knows exactly how to make homemade pie crust, I figured that baking an apple pie from scratch was juuuust about doable as a Girl Scout meeting.

And it just about was!

Here's what I asked each Girl Scout to bring:
  • approximately five pounds of any variety of apple
  • sharp knife
  • cutting board
  • mixing bowl
  • oven mitt
  • rolling pin
  • measuring spoons and cups
  • hair tie or bandana
A couple of the cleverest kids (or the kids with the cleverest parents!) also brought a vegetable peeler and/or a cutting/coring thingy and a dish towel. I attempted to teach everyone how to easily peel and core an apple with just a paring knife, but this did NOT go over well--the kids hated the very idea of it, and they traded around the peelers and corers instead. Kids these days!

I used troop funds to buy all the pie crust and the rest of the apple filling ingredients, as well as aluminum foil, plastic wrap, aluminum pie tins, a 12-pack of Mason jars, and several prepared pie crusts.

After everyone had taste-tested the apples, my teenager taught the rest of the Girl Scouts how to make pie crust from scratch, while my co-leader and I assisted. It was a process, but everyone did create a pie crust! 

The kids wrapped their pie crusts in plastic wrap and put them in the refrigerator to chill while I taught everyone the dead simple process of making fresh apple pie filling from scratch. I encouraged the kids to use a variety of apples, relying on their taste-testing to help them choose, and to taste the filling as they went to make sure that it was to their preference. We might have a picky eater or two in the troop, ahem...

When the pie filling was ready, the kids took their pie crusts out of the refrigerator and learned how to roll them out and put them in the disposable pie tins I'd bought. They added the filling, then rolled out their top crust and decided how they wanted to put it on. When planning this meeting, the kids had been interested in learning how to decorate their pies and make cute pie crusts, so I showed them several inspo images from Pie Style, but everyone ultimately decided to make a lattice top, which was a new skill for most.


Then the kids crimped the edges, wrapped their pies VERY well in plastic wrap... and put them back in the refrigerator to take home. We did NOT have enough room to be baking five whole pies at once!

Instead, I brought out the prepared pie crusts and the kids used those, along with any remaining apple pie filling, to make hand pies and/or muffin tin pies. I think they might have liked that activity the best, because they baked quickly and then the kids could eat them!

Learn strategies to use up surplus apples.


Food waste is one of my personal issues (and the troop has those pesky picky eaters!), so it was important to me to show the kids some ways to preserve or prepare apples that you don't feel like eating out of hand or in a pie.

Both applesauce and apple juice are the easiest thing in the world to make, so I had both my giant stock pot and my very old juicer (it was a wedding gift!) out, and at the start of the meeting, since applesauce does take some time, I asked the kids which they'd rather make. They agreed on juice, so at the very end of the meeting, after each kid had cleaned up but before she left, she got to juice herself a pint jar's worth of apple juice to take home with her. This was a new experience for almost everyone, and I think they all really liked it! 

And, of course, the most important strategy to use up apples: while the kids worked, they threw all of their peels, cores, and scraps into a giant bowl in the middle of the table. After we'd cleaned up, I tossed the entire bowl of scraps to the chickens, and they feasted!

Create an apple recipe book.



Since most of those apple pie activities has been to earn the Harvest badge, the kids needed, in my opinion, one more apple-centric activity to completely earn the Apple Quest fun patch, so I made a Shared Google Doc and asked them to each contribute one apple recipe so that we could make a little cookbook.

I'd hoped they'd get super into the project, and at that time we had an upcoming volunteer date at a local food pantry so I also had it in my head that perhaps we could print the recipes into a little booklet for the pantry to hand out during those times when it was swamped with apples, but the kids did not get super into the project, and so we didn't do anything more with it. 

To be honest, I think they were just flat-out sick of apples! But the project did remind me that my favorite cake, Smitten Kitchen's apple cake, exists, and it's just as delicious as I remembered, so as far as I'm concerned the whole thing was a huge success. 

Contribute to a harvest meal for someone in need.


The kids definitely wanted to do a service project as part of this badge, but they dithered a bit over what, exactly, they wanted to do. Also remember that high school kids are VERY busy, and some of these kids were also working on college applications, scholarship applications, Gold Award applications... It is a lot of work to be a high school student these days!

I researched a few opportunities for them to consider, including serving a meal at one of our city's shelters or hosting a food drive for one of the local food pantries. The idea that the kids liked best, though, was volunteering on a specific day to help food pantry patrons choose the components for a Thanksgiving dinner. So the Saturday before Thanksgiving, we went to the food pantry's distribution location and helped fetch and carry and otherwise made ourselves useful. I carried soooo many frozen turkeys!

Make an autumn craft.


The kids wanted to make gnomes, but we kept running out of time to make them. Eventually, when we met to wrap the gifts they had bought for the kid we were sponsoring for Christmas (for the same food pantry as the Thanksgiving project!), I tacked gnome-crafting onto that meeting. 

I actually had almost everything for this gnome project already in my stash, so I just bought a faux fur remnant, rice, and hot glue. The gnomes all turned out sooo cute, with bodies made from one of my partner's old Henleys and hats made from some of my infinite felt stash. 

References and Resources


Here are some other resources I had available during our Harvest badgework:

  • The Apple Lover's Cookbook: This book has photos and information about lots of apple varieties, and the recipes are good for Girl Scouts to flip through to see all the yummy possibilities for cooking with apples.
  • The Book on Pie: The recipes in this book look DELICIOUS, so it was another book that was fun for Girl Scouts to flip there. There are so many kinds of pie!!!
  • Pie Academy: This has good process photos, especially of making the pie crust and making a lattice top. It has several different pie crust recipes, and some unusual recipes for pie fillings (one contains KETCHUP!?!?).
  • Pie Camp: This was my main reference book for the pie meeting. I taught the kids McDermott's "20-20-20" method for baking, passed on her tips for preventing a soggy bottom, and demonstrated how to make and use the foil shield that prevents a burned top. We also used her cooking instructions to make the muffin tin pies.
  • Pie Squared: These are essentially sheet pan pies, both sweet and savory. This would be a good recipe book if you wanted to serve fresh-baked pie at your Girl Scout troop meeting.
  • Pie Style: Even though it was plenty for the troop to learn how to make a lattice pie crust, because decorating pies was something they'd expressed interest in I showed them the photos from this book of faaancy pie decorations. Everyone went "Oooh!," but nobody wanted to give any of the ideas a try just then, ahem...
Overall, I think this turned out to be a very successful badge! The kids wanted to do it and helped plan it, everyone learned a new skill, a couple of kids got a chance to practice their leadership by teaching the others specific techniques, we did some community service, and now each kid has some more practical life knowledge in her toolkit. 

Up next: cookie season, including seeing if I can sneak in a cookie badge or two, and travel planning, including me looking for yet another retired or Council's Own travel-focused badge that these well-traveled kids haven't yet earned. 

Hire me to create more travel badge for older kids, GSUSA! I'll do an awesome job!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, road trips, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Thursday, December 7, 2023

Homeschool High School Chemistry: Electrolysis of Water Lab

Another day, another kitchen table chemistry lab!

I don't know what the "proper" number of hands-on labs a high school student usually conducts in a non-AP Science class is (in her year of public school Honors Biology, my own teenager conducted one), but in our homeschool high school honors science classes, I try for at least ten high-quality labs, experiments, and/or demonstrations, all written up by the student in her lab notebook for that subject. 

And they don't have to be complicated! This Electrolysis of Water lab could be conducted by an early elementary student, it's so simple. It takes just minutes, and it's easy as pie to conduct at the kitchen table.

To make it appropriate for a high school Honors Chemistry lab, just add rigor! When she completed this lab, my teenager was studying Lewis Electron-Dot Structures and calculating chemical reaction formulas, so I wrote her Post-Lab Questions to require her to practice these skills in a real-world environment.

In AP Language and Literature, she's looking deeper into the etymologies of words, so I also included a question about that to build context. 

Here's the set-up for the lab (pretend that you don't see the erasable pen that my teenagers like to use to cheat the lab notebook system of "write in pen; no erasing"):


Salting the water to the proper ratio (feel free to admire the chopstick stirring rod...):


Attaching the wires to the battery (the electrodes are currently touching, but she'll fix that as soon as she notices):


And now... observation! I always think that this is the coolest, most magical demonstration. Look at all the bubbles!


A surprise to us all: we didn't expect the aluminum to start flaking away! 


Is it an aluminum oxide coating on the foil? A manufacturing flaw resulting in improper adhesion of the aluminum that weakens it?


My favorite thing about science is the way that new information inspires new questions!

If that's not enough electrolysis for you, here are a few extension activities:

  • incorporate Snap Circuits. I actually thought pretty hard about incorporating part of this demonstration, because we have sooooo many Snap Circuits. This would be an especially good extension if your focus is actually on electricity. 
  • incorporate a pH indicator. This is a neat addition, especially if you've recently studied pH. Red cabbage pH indicator is another excellent homeschool DIY project!
  • clean iron. The Children's Museum of Indianapolis has a giant electrolysis tank where you can observe the real-time process of rust removal from one of Captain Kidd's cannons, so you can observe this real-world bit of science in action even if you don't have your own iron to clean via electrolysis.
And here are a couple of books that include similar electrolysis experiments. The Marie Curie book is even written TO middle-grade kids!

And there you have it: excellent science using household materials in just a few minutes. With that little time spent on the actual lab, you've got plenty of room to really ramp up the rigor of the post-lab questions!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, road trips, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Saturday, September 2, 2023

Homeschool Science: How to Grow a Pumpkin out of Another Pumpkin

 

This tutorial was originally posted on Crafting a Green World way back in 2015!

My kids just harvested the pumpkin plants that they've been nurturing all spring and summer. It was quite an exciting achievement for them, and even more so because they've actually been following this process for almost a full year now. 

Almost a full year ago, they first picked out some organically-grown, heirloom pumpkins, and these newly harvested pumpkins came directly out of the body of those. It was a fascinating process, a pretty easy way to grow pumpkins, and a great way for a kid studying botany to follow the life cycle of a plant throughout its entire lifespan. 

Here's what we did: 

1. In the fall or winter, choose your pumpkins. Have the kids look for organically-grown, locally-raised, heirloom pumpkins. We found ours about this time of year--I can tell, because the kids drew Jack-o-lantern faces on them in Sharpie, since of course we weren't going to cut them. 

2. Store them all winter. I don't have any great tips for this, and our own storage didn't go perfectly. The kids had chosen several, and we kept them all winter on our nature table. Every now and then, I'd walk by and notice that a pumpkin was starting to rot, and so I'd toss it out in the bushes for the chickens to eat. Now that I think about it... THAT'S why we have two volunteer pumpkin plants in those bushes this year! We actually got loads of pumpkins from those two vines! 

This winter, I plan to store our pumpkins in our root cellar. We'll lose the opportunity to have all those conversations that naturally occurred as the sight of a pumpkin caused a question to pop into a kid's head, but more pumpkins should survive the winter that way. 


3. In the spring, cut them open and fill them with dirt. Set up a work space outside, give the kid a knife, and have her cut open the top of her pumpkin. Note all of the seeds inside, chat about it, remove a seed for dissection and study under the microscope, etc. 

Have the kid fill her pumpkin all the way to the top with good-quality potting soil, then water it. 

These pumpkins are a little tricky to put under grow lights, since they're so much taller than the other seed flats that you'll also have under there, but if you can manage to start them indoors, it'll be well worth it. On the other hand, this year I deliberately had the kids choose small varieties of pumpkins, so that they could plant them directly in the garden and still have time for the pumpkins to mature. 


4. Plant the pumpkins. Have the kid dig a hole deep enough to cover the entire pumpkin, and then plant it. You don't want any pumpkin sticking up out of the soil to rot, but covering it with dirt will allow it to decompose in the ground and turn into lovely nutrients for the pumpkin seedlings.  

5. Cull the weaklings. One of the coolest things about this project is that your kids will see a LOT of pumpkin sprouts coming out of that pumpkin! Even at nine and eleven, my two thought that this was pretty awesome. 

Of course, they'll have to continually pinch off the weaker ones--I had mine pinch off half of the seedlings at a time, every time, until they were left with one lone winner. 

This step does take supervision. My younger daughter accidentally pinched off her best seedling pretty late in the game, and ended up not getting a pumpkin at all from that particular plant. She was SUPER bummed! 

6. Weed and water. For the rest of the summer, the kids can care for their pumpkins just as they do the rest of their garden. This is a great opportunity for a garden journal, or weekly measurement, or other monitoring of the plant's progress. 

7. Harvest. In the late summer or early fall, your kid can harvest her pumpkin, knowing that she not only grew it herself, and not only from seed, but actually from last year's pumpkin that she also picked out. Does she want to make it into a pie, or save it to make a pumpkin next year?

Tuesday, August 29, 2023

Homeschool High School Biology: The ProtistsThat Live in the Local Lake

You will never want to even touch pond water again after completing this biology lab.

But you WILL want to have an aquarium full of pond water living in your home so you can keep hundreds of thousands of microscopic protozoa pets!

This lab is a companion to CK-12 Biology 8.4, which is the chapter on protists.

Observing prepared slides of protists is a good preliminary lab, because it allows your high schooler to review proper microscope usage and how to make microscope drawings, and to get an idea what the live protists might look like. 

Here are the lab instructions that I wrote for my teenager, and here are the materials that we used for the lab:

There was a blast from the past on the package of microscope slides:

I used to shop in that independent educational toys and teaching supplies store ALL THE TIME when my children were wee. The dollhouse I bought one toddler to celebrate her toilet training came from there, as did the PlaySkool circus set that the other kid picked out for her sixth birthday present, about an hour before she broke her leg on the playground and it turned out that a huge Playskool set was absolutely the perfect thing for a kid with a cast on her leg to play with for a solid month!

Fifteen years after picking out that dollhouse, my teenager collected water from a local lake, brought it home, dropped a single drop onto a microscope slide, and put it under the microscope to see what lives there.

A lot, it turned out!


In the above video, I think I see an amoeba, but I think that all the larger creatures are perhaps nematodes? I haven't even looked to see what the teenager identified them as in her lab notebook, but I'm sure her guess is better than mine!

The next video is by far my coolest:


I'm pretty sure those are stalked ciliates! The teenagers and I have done this lab several times, and I've only seen these particular critters once! I'm think all the critters swimming around them are Euglenae. Or maybe Paramecia? 

Those two videos are taken at just 100x, so you can see how much you can see even at that low magnitude. 400x, below, gives you more detail, but we don't use any additives to slow down our protists, so anything speedier than that oozy amoeba at the bottom right is hard to see.


This is a different water sample on a different day. I think that might be another Euglenoid because of its chloroplasts, which perhaps makes the critters that I previously thought were Euglenae actually Paramecia. I should probably get off my butt and go see what the teenager identified everything as, because I'm sure that she did more research than I'm currently doing!


The identities might be a bit sketchy, but the point of this particular lab isn't specifically to correctly identify every protist. Think of how much the teenager learned about sample collecting, microscope usage, and protists in general, as well as the practice that she got writing a lab report, problem-solving in science, and making decisions about identification. 

And most importantly, she got to see all the magic that lives out of sight in our local lake!

This protist lab pairs well with this macroinvertebrate identification lab, as well as this larger Water unit

Friday, August 11, 2023

Day 13 in England: In the Footsteps of Mary Anning

 

Low tide waits for no one, and so three of us were up at the crack of dawn this morning to drive over to Lyme Regis and spend a couple more hours in the footsteps of Mary Anning.

Here's our complete itinerary for the day:

  • fossil hunting in Lyme Regis
  • back to Beer for breakfast and picking up the sleepyhead
  • back to Lyme Regis again for sightseeing
  • drive back to Gatwick Airport, stopping at a convenient local chain store along the way for souvenirs
  • drop off the rental car, check into our airport hotel, and try to fit a hundred pounds of rocks and fossils into four carry-ons and four personal items!
Who knows how on earth we would have gotten all our rocks and fossils home if we'd been as successful at fossil hunting as I am in my dreams!


We parked by Monmouth Beach, then hustled west, where we puttered on the shore, fossil hunting and admiring the Ammonite Pavement:




We found a few pretty treasures of our own!

The best part, though, was imagining myself in the footsteps of Mary Anning. This stretch of coast was her backyard, and although she ranged widely both east and west, this was her home ground:




I'm sure I'm grubbing in the wet sand just like she did, only she was wearing massive wool skirts and I'm wearing a filthy pair of joggers:








Eventually, we had to make the long walk down the beach back to our car (funny how the walk is always SO much longer on the way back!) so we could go back to Beer and fetch our teenager before checkout.

I did wash my hands before I sat down for my last full English breakfast of the trip, but I didn't change out of my muddy clothes. Gotta stay true to myself no matter where I am!

In our early morning trip to Lyme Regis, we'd encountered little traffic and just a couple of dog walkers and joggers. By mid-morning, however, Bank Holiday Monday/Mid-Term Break was in full swing omg! Matt was a tentative but extremely careful driver during this whole week, and it was funny/terrifying to encounter so many absolutely terrible drivers on these, the narrowest roads outside of Dartmoor--honestly, I think some were even narrower than in Dartmoor! We missed by centimeters being collided into by a car that turned into us around a blind corner, and half the cars we saw (including ours, ahem) spent half the time driving half onto the sidewalk. And that was even with us parking in a pay lot at the edge of town--the traffic we saw in the middle of town was absolutely bonkers!

British friends, WHAT ON EARTH.

Nevertheless, I made it to my ultimate destination, the pinnacle of this trip: 



I was so lucky, because this museum is closed on Mondays. The only exception?

School breaks!

So me and all the rowdy school kids and all their parents happily crowded inside on this Half-Term Monday, and I could achieve my dream of worshipping at the feet of Mary Anning, on the spot where she once lived and worked and kept her fossils.

The Lyme Regis Museum is built on the site of Mary Anning's former house, which was torn down in 1889. The only known depiction of what her house looked like is this drawing--


--which the museum turned into this model:

I love those picture windows. I imagine them all full of fossils!

The museum has a wonderful mix of exhibits. It has fossils collected (or likely collected) by Mary Anning--


I have explained to Matt numerous times that I am in desperate need of a giant LEGO ichthyosaur of my own, and yet what did I get for my birthday? Well, actually I got an absolutely awesome DIY model kit of Stonehenge and I'm thrilled with it... but I also still really want a giant LEGO ichthyosaur!


This fossil is a shark skull, the first of its kind and used as the holotype of the species. Mary Anning discovered it, collected it, and prepared it... so obviously it's named Hybodus bechei after Henry De la Beche.

This complete ichthyosaur fossil is on loan here while the Lyme Regis Museum crowdfunds the money to purchase it.

--items from the period in which she lived--

Look at all those pipes! I mudlarked so many of their stems on the Thames!

--and tons of other fossils collected in this area and donated by local fossil hunters. 

The gift shop was great, too. Here's me having an emotional reaction to JURASSIC CREATURE STUFFIES!!!

I'm supposed to stop buying "family stuffies" so I did not bring any home, but I intend to revisit this ridiculous rule soon. The only stuffies that I so far own and insist on exhibiting in the family space are 1) an Edmontosaurus annectens, 2) a whale shark, 3) the exact same mermaid sequin dinosaur that the SpaceX Crew Dragon took into orbit as their "gravity indicator," and 4) Captain Ameribear, a Build a Bear that I liberated from a friend as we were setting up for a group garage sale. That is NOT too many family stuffies, you guys!

One of the exhibit labels in the Lyme Regis Museum mentioned that Mary Anning was buried at St. Michael's Church, "just a few hundred meters from the museum." So guess what I Googled next?



That's two of my most favorite heroines who have died of breast cancer, if you're keeping count.

St. Michael's Church, like Mary Anning's former house, has its back to the sea, and below the church there's actually a paved path that follows the coast and passes over the spot where she made one of her best discoveries. 


If you walk down the path to the end, you'll find Mary, herself, ammonite in hand, Tray at her feet, walking with purpose towards eternity:


Yes, I made Matt take a photo of me walking arm in arm with her, chatting like the best friends we are. I have a very vivid and active internal life!


My meeting with Mary was the culmination and final wish on my list for this trip, so we meandered slowly back to our car up the narrow streets of Lyme Regis, browsing in every rocks and fossil shop we saw along the way. We braved the last of the narrow roads, and Matt handled the A303 like a man who'd been driving here his whole life and knew every single rule for roundabouts:


On the outskirts of London, I found a shopping area that said it had a Sainsbury's, so we detoured over for Cadbury and crisps to take back home, and we had a lovely surprise! The teenager had discovered, too late in the London leg of our trip, a discount bookstore chain that she wanted to visit. This was our second to last day in the city, though, and there was not a location anywhere near us--but, alas, the day before, when we'd taken that long bus trip out to Pax Lodge, we'd seen one from the bus window but didn't know what it was! ARGH!

I felt terrible about it, because it was, like, literally one of two entire things the kid expressed genuine interest in during the entire trip, so omg I was beyond ecstatic when it turned out that this shopping area had The Works bookstore

Bonus: it also had a Sainsbury's AND a Poundland! All our cheap souvenirs in one convenient trip!