Homeschool High School Biology: Prepared Slides of Protists

 

The Amscope prepared slides of bacteria were garbage, but the prepared slides of protists are MUCH better!

They can't replace the real-life observation that we'll be doing later, when we look at lake water through the microscope (OMG don't ever drink lake water, because it is chock-full of protists!!!), but looking at prepared slides is a good way for a student to study anatomy, and specifically to get used to--and see the differences between!--an illustrated diagram of an organism and an actual example of that organism. Real-life critters never look exactly like their diagrams!

In 2017, when the kids were still older elementary/middle school but it was becoming clear that Will, at least would likely want to homeschool through high school, I did OMG TONS of research before buying this microscope, the Levenhuk 320, and I have been so happy with it! This specific model is actually discontinued now, I bought it so long ago, but honestly I'd trust anything from the Levenhuk site. A year later, I even bought the digital camera attachment, and it is also so great. The user interface is very dated, a little clunky, and extremely non-intuitive--

--but once you click around enough to figure out what you're supposed to do, it's fairly seamless to switch between the optical eyepiece and the camera, and to take both photos and videos of the cool stuff you're looking at.

At each magnification, I like to use the optical eyepiece to observe first, then pull that eyepiece out and switch in the camera eyepiece, already plugged into my laptop and set up in the software. Then I can adjust the focus if I need to, and then I can start taking photos and videos.

Here's an example of the genus Euglena at 400x:

If you scroll to the bottom of this Wikipedia article, you can see a video of a Euglena that looks very similar to this slide. It would be better if the slide had additional examples of Euglena when it's not a sphere, though.

Here's a Volvox at 100x:

The large encasement isn't a single cell, like a prokaryote, but instead a gelatinous structure that the cells hang out in. The staining on this slide is a little weird, because Volvox would usually be green.

The best prepared slide in this group is the Spirogyra. Here it is at 40x:

And here it is at 100x:

There are some other really good examples of Spirogyra here.

I sourced an illustrated diagram of Euglena, Volvox, and Spirogyra, and Syd's assignment will be to sketch the microscope views at 40x and 100x of each slide, then label the sketches with the features she can identify, using the diagrams as references. I think this will be a good refresher on how to use the microscope and how to sketch microscope observations.

And then it's off to the lake!

If You Can't Get a Hole in the Head, Get Five Four-Week-Old Foster Kittens

Syd and I are going to be playing around with idioms next week in her Creative Writing study, so it's relevant that I tell you that I needed five four-week-old kittens like I needed a hole in the head.

But to be fair, I did tell her that she needed to choose a regular volunteer commitment this year, and I did tell her that it should be something that she's passionate about. After all, those college application essays aren't going to be writing themselves!

She'd been making some noise about going back to volunteer at the little local food pantry we used to volunteer at weekly when she was a tot, so I thought that's what she'd be doing. Now that she's fully licensed she can even drive herself, so I could just sit my butt down in a quiet home for two hours a week while she built her leadership skills and logged service learning hours and created the foundation of a kick-ass college application essay about food insecurity.

But instead, somehow I found myself putting my name on a quite different volunteer application that she filled out, and then somehow I found myself going with her to pick up a litter of foster kittens. Another volunteer had already claimed the litter of four six-week-old kittens we'd originally planned to pick up, but the staffer said that another litter of five six-week-old kittens had just been dropped off that morning; would we perhaps like to take them, instead?

Five isn't that different from four, so fine.

As the staffer was examining them, though, she was all, "Hmmm... these don't look like they're six weeks old. I think they're more like five weeks."

Five weeks instead of six weeks means they'd spend just one more extra week in our care, so... okay, fine.

A few more minutes, and that became, "Actually, five weeks might be a stretch. I'm going to write them down as four weeks old."

And of course, by then I'd already been petting them, and seen that one is a tortoiseshell and one is a TORBIE!!!!!, so the news that we'd be coming home with one more kitten than planned and keeping them all at least two more weeks than planned sailed right over my head. An hour later, I was sitting on my playroom floor, holding both that tortoiseshell AND that torbie in my hands and giving them kisses on their little fuzzy foreheads!

Here are Socks, a tuxedo, and Athena, the torbie, the bravest of the litter and the first ones out of their travel crate:

The shelter gave them their first set of vaccinations before we took them home, so here are the other three tired babies sleeping off their shots in their travel crate:

And then Socks laid down for a nap, too:

Eventually, everyone was awake at the same time and whoa. It's been wild ever since!

Foster kittens are a LOT more work than it would be to spend two hours a week unloading produce at the food pantry. We've got to keep them isolated from the other household pets, and just sanitizing their area and keeping them cleaned up takes tons of time. They'll happily use the litterbox, but they'll also just as happily use the floor or their bedding--you will not BELIEVE what the kids' bathroom looked like this morning! I gagged, Syd literally almost fainted, and then five bad kitties had to get stuffed back into their travel crate while we spray cleaned and steam mopped and Lysoled the floor and walls. 

Seriously, the WALLS!!!! And then we had to come at each of the kittens with a warm washcloth, too. They were furious.

Thankfully, these guys are acting wolfishly healthy so far, wrestling and scampering and growling at each other over the bowl of wet cat food:

And they flock to Syd. Check them out sleeping and sprawling and fighting all over her lap:

A few years ago, a young friend's cat died, and in the condolence letter that I wrote to her, I told her that I believed that cats could sense when you were a person who had been loved by a cat, and she shouldn't be surprised if she found that cats were drawn to her even more now. Of course I didn't actually believe that; it was mostly just a pretty way to express to her that love is never wasted, and I wanted her to still feel like her Lavender's love was with her.

But looking at these five little foster kittens, happy and snug in a cuddle pile in Syd's arms--

--I swear I can almost feel the invisible spirit of Gracie standing there, telling five scared kittens, "Go over and climb on that kid right there. You're going to be so safe and happy with her."

And so they did. And I know that Syd actually has smiled since Gracie died--we've told jokes and had fun and things have, mostly, gone back to normal. She's definitely smiled and laughed, and she's definitely had her happy moments. But she hasn't yet been as happy as she'd been with Gracie, I don't think. I think she always misses her, and I think that remembering Gracie hurts her. I know it hurts me, and it hurts me to see my kid's grief, always just right there below the surface. 

So I'd like to imagine that the invisible spirit of Gracie really was there, that first time that those five foster kittens curled up in a cuddle pile in Syd's arms. I'd like to think that in some way Gracie, too, got to be there to see her beloved kid really, truly, genuinely happy again. 

Homeschool High School Biology: Fermentation of Sauerkraut

Welcome to Honors Biology: Year 2!

During my kid's brief foray into the public school system a couple of years ago, I discovered, to my dismay, that the entire full-year high school Honors Biology class didn't get past ecology! They studied ecosystems, cells, the cell cycle, ecology, and evolution... and then they were done. The kids then had to take a state-mandated standardized test on those topics, and I imagine that for many of them, that was the end of their biology studies.

No plants. No animals. One lab. No MICROSCOPE!!! Like, don't get me wrong, cells and ecosystems and ecology are all super important, and hallelujah my state is at least teaching evolution, but... aren't plants and animals the fun parts of biology? Aren't labs and microscopes the high-interest activities that inspire kids to love science?

Anyway, that's why I feel perfectly justified in turning our homeschool biology study into a two-year course, rounded out with lots of plants, lots of animals, lots of labs, and LOTS of microscope time. 

Honors Biology: Year 2 begins with a study of prokaryotes. Please read all of the sections about bacteria in your biology textbook, and master the practice problems, but then, for the love of all that's good and holy and engaging and enriching, let's go do a lab or look through the microscope. Or SOMETHING!!!

My set of AmScope prepared slides does have a few bacteria slides, but I don't love them. The AmScope prepared slides can be really hit or miss--some are absolutely fabulous, including the protist slides we'll look at next, but the bacteria ones weren't worth trying to incorporate into a lesson. Instead, we looked at illustrated diagrams of bacteria, and played around with growing our own.

Which means... sauerkraut!!!!!

Here's the biology lab that I wrote to lead Syd through the scientific process of making sauerkraut. My favorite parts are calculating the correct grams of table salt and testing the sauerkraut's pH. Most sauerkraut recipes call for a cabbage by the head and a specific measurement of salt, usually in tablespoons. There is some wiggle room in the amount of salt in a sauerkraut recipe, but it's much more accurate to weigh the cabbage, then add 2.5% of that weight in as salt.

Because it can sometimes be kind of lonesome to do a lab alone, I recruited a second biology student for this activity:

Which means that we'll get a yummy two quarts and one pint of sauerkraut out of this lab!

If you've never made sauerkraut before, I really like this walkthrough.

I've never had a problem with my sauerkraut spoiling, but if the thought worries you, an airlock system pretty much guarantees success. 

To see an example of a scientific paper written on the subject of sauerkraut, check this out. There is a lot of sophisticated study that an interested student could make from sauerkraut!

If you're interested in other ways of incorporating food preservation into a kid's homeschool studies, check out my totally made-up Girl Scout Homesteading badge. So many practical life skills in evidence!

And to follow along with all my homeschool and crafty adventures and mishaps--and to see how yummy our sauerkraut looks when it's done!!!--check out my Craft Knife Facebook page!

The Road Map Quilt is Finished!

 

Quilts intended to be given for a specific holiday are the BEST, because you have to finish them!

And that's how the giant denim log cabin quilt that I've been dreaming of for my own bed is still a WIP several years old, with the extra-wide red flannel that I bought to back it narrowly escaping from being accidentally used in every new project I think up, but this quilt, intended as a car play mat for my baby niece's birthday, went from idea to reality in the space of a single summer. 

It also happened to get WAY overengineered in the process, but whatever.

To see the quilt design as I thought it up and pieced it, check out this post where I show off my finished road map quilt top. 

After it was pieced, I needed to think up a few applique embellishments. I wanted the embellishments to hint at the purpose for each area--the park, the neighborhoods, the construction zones, the parking lots, the rivers, the roads, the oceans, the dino dig sites--without being too prescriptive. I wanted features that were naturally stationary, so no animals or vehicles. I had trouble figuring out all the pieces that I wanted, and I had trouble clearly explaining my vision, which led to the fun game of people trying to help me by suggesting ideas, and me going, "No. No. No. Nuh-uh. Not that. Um, no. Nope. Not that, either." 

Fun fact: that's actually my pet peeve when people do that to ME, so sorry!

I never did end up happy with my choices for the river (I don't think the piers look like piers) or the construction zones (I think these cones are oversized compared to the other elements)--

--but I love how everything else turned out. I used all stash for the applique pieces, and almost all materials upcycled from other garments, so I think there's a lot of fun texture variety that will appeal to a toddler. 

There's toweling for the beach!

And work pants, quilting cotton, and bias tape for the houses!

I like the idea that this will be both a play mat and a snuggly quilt. The cotton batting will be comfy on little knees, and cozy on little sleepyheads!

I don't know why I can never have any peace when I'm working on the floor. These photos are just a glimpse of ALL THE DRAMA that took place on this spot.

Jones was in the way and screaming his head off, so Syd thought she'd distract him by giving him some catnip off the hanging planter in the window. 

It distracted him, alright, but only to the extent that he rolled and ran around screaming all over my quilt that I was trying to trim, hollering for more catnip. 

And then Spots heard him and she came hunting for catnip, too, and then they both started hallucinating mice under the quilt and attacking it.

Here it is two episodes of Surviving Antarctica later:

During this time, I also learned that Will does NOT think that traveling on foot through Antarctica is a legitimate path of exploration, and especially not if you fly to the continent. And if you do go there and get stuck and nearly die, you nevertheless have no business asking a whaling vessel or a tug boat to pause its legitimate business to come save you and your crew, because you knew full well what you were getting everyone into.

So that's that, everyone! Please consult with Will before planning your next trek.

I barely had enough of that stash cotton batting for this quilt, and I'm going to be very sad the next time I start a new quilt and find myself having to buy new batting. But that's a problem for Future Julie! Present Julie also found a grey flat sheet in the stash that matches the grey flannel roads perfectly. I'd been holding onto that sheet because I thought it was the one that I was going to use to make the final blackout curtain in my bedroom, but I compared it to the other two curtains and it doesn't quite match, so

1. Where is the sheet that matches, so I can make that curtain?
2. Where did this sheet come from, and what did I intend to use it for?

Well, whatever it was meant to be, it's a quilt back now!

When it comes to quilting the lines on grey flannel roads, it's Frixion pens for the win!

I didn't even iron the marks away, just washed and dried the quilt and those marks and the chalk marks on the black flannel roads disappeared like magic!

A back-to-front blanket binding...

... and my road map quilt is finished!

But, of course, the most important question: is it fun?

Better get out the Hot Wheels and see:

It's fun!!!

Here are some cars parked in the bias tape parking lot:

And here are some in the park, parked by the waffle shirt and inside-out sweatshirt tree:

Because our baby niece lives in California, Matt designed her a palm tree, and I made it from some T-shirt and dress pants fabric and put it in the park:

The construction cones are blocking off the construction zone so that non-work vehicles stay out:

There are a couple of houses already in the neighborhoods, just waiting for some building block and LEGO neighbors:

And if you ever want to do some paleontology, this is the place to do it!

After work, you can drive to the beach to relax:

You might remember that for a while I was super worried that the quilt would be, just, ridiculously big--like, her parents have to have enough floor space to lay it down, for goodness' sake!--but now that it's finished, I don't think it's too large:

I mean, it IS pretty big--that's Matt's head just barely visible over the top of it, so it's a good six feet!

But the child simply HAS to have enough room to spread out. It's no fun if you can't spread out!

Syd suggested that for upcoming holidays, I should create quilts with different small world themes to connect to this one. Like, you could drive to the outer space quilt to the north, or the deep ocean quilt to the south. Perhaps a mountain range to the east, complete with castle and dragon?

Thinking up new ideas might be the best part of handmade presents!

The Mummy, the Carousel, and the Dinosaur Eggs: I Took a VERY Deep Dive into the History of the Children's Museum of Indianapolis

2008

 I've started to get really interested in really deep dives into really specific topics. Disassociating by immersing oneself into a research project is such a pleasant feeling!

The history of the Children's Museum of Indianapolis is one of my recent small obsessions. It's long been a special place for me and the kids, and it's been interesting to see how some of my favorite parts of the museum, such as its deep respect for children and its integration into the neighborhood in which it's placed, has manifested over the course of its existence. 

I found this 1982 museum-published history in my local university's library (along with some old speeches, guides to extinct galleries, and other interesting documents that I checked out and pored over), and I was riveted by the attention to small, vivid details that it brought to enliven what could have been an extremely dry museum history:

Most of the kids' favorite parts of the museum, such as their holiday celebration and dinosaur exhibit, are too recent to be in the book, but some, such as that carousel we ride every time we visit and the mummy we used to pay our respects to before Chicago took it back, are just as old.

2011

The story of the carousel is particularly interesting, and is a good example of the vivid details that I love most, the ones that would be completely lost to history without the work of journalists, anthropologists, and other historians who take an interest in first-person storytelling. The Broad Ripple Carousel dates to 1917, and operated in a local park until 1956, when the roof finally collapsed and destroyed it. By that time, the animals had been falling apart for a while, as well, getting no more than hasty, non-professional repairs. 

In 1965, the current director of the Children's Museum, Mildred Compton, tried to track down where these worn, broken, beloved 50-year-old carousel animals might have gotten to. This was back in the days when telephone tag apparently hadn't even been invented yet, because each check-in required her to take a physical trip to the physical office of the city's Parks and Recreation department. And because it's local government, mostly nobody had any idea what she was talking about. They'd sort of promise to look into it, but then whenever she'd check back in to pester whomever she'd wheedled that sort-of promise from, she'd find out that they'd left the department, someone new was in charge, and she had to ask them all over again, hear again that they had no idea what she was talking about, and again wheedle a new promise out of them to check into it.

2015

Eventually, Compton got the Parks and Recreation department to reckon that maybe they did have a few of the carousel animals in storage, and okay, fine, she could borrow two of them. They gave her two horses in godawful condition, and she got a local acquaintance to refinish them. He could do the sanding and oiling and repainting work okay, but he couldn't replace the tails, which had been real horse tails.

Did you know that as recently as the late 1960s there was a literal slaughterhouse in DOWNTOWN INDIANAPOLIS?!? And... it apparently regularly slaughtered horses, so much so that when Compton went down there to ask if she could maybe have a horsetail or two, they just showed her into a room where there lay a huge, bloody pile of horsetails??? She rifled through the pile until she found some that she thought might match the horses, then soaked and cleaned them herself in her own home.

2015

A few years passed, then in 1969, thanks to some excellent networking, Compton scored a promise from the Parks and Recreation department that the Children's Museum could have ALL of their carousel animals. Compton and a coworker went to the storage building to collect them, but the animals were in such terrible shape that they essentially ended up crawling around on the floor, trying to snag all the little broken-off pieces of body parts that were strewn around from over a decade of neglect. Even on the intact parts of the animals, the wood was split and warped, and the museum spent years sending the animals out a couple a time to professional restoration artists in Cincinnati. 

The original idea had been just to display the animals, because even though it was a children's museum, most of the museum exhibits weren't interactive yet, or really even hands-on. But then Compton went to a carousel convention (lol!), and the carousel enthusiasts convinced her that what she really ought to do is buy a vintage carousel mechanism and turn her restoration into a living, working carousel again.

2020

Which would be so cool! Except, the museum didn't have the complete set of original animals from that Broad Ripple carousel. There were supposed to be three leaping stags in among all the other prancing animals, but they hadn't been in that storage building. When Compton checked in about it, a staffer told her flat out that they had disintegrated, but that felt... suspicious.

So the museum literally got the local newspaper to run a column asking for the public's help to provide any information about these long-missing stags. And one day, an anonymous informant called the museum. He was all, "The Parks and Rec department has your stags. Go to this year's Christmas show and see."

2022

And wouldn't you know it, but when the Parks and Rec department put on the 1973 Christmas show, guess who was on the float pulling Santa's sleigh?

Three. Wooden. Stags.

Compton marched herself back to the Parks and Recreation department and gave them a lecture entitled "Did you NOT tell me that I could have ALL the carousel animals?"

2010, with a broken leg, riding a stag

And that's how the museum came to have a working 1917 carousel, stags and all, on the top floor! Fortunately, the carousel idea came around as the museum was working on plans to demolish the historic house they'd been operating out of and build a brand-new museum building in its place. The plans had to be altered to allow for the size and weight of the carousel, and it's on the top floor of the museum because that's the only place they could make those adjustments without having to pretty much start over from scratch.

2019, just having come from the temporary exhibit of Greek antiquities, riding a stag

I think the museum's emphasis on dinosaurs must have gotten started in the early 1970s, when that magical Mildred Compton convinced the owner of some of the first dinosaur eggs ever discovered, found in the Gobi Desert from 1922-1923. The donor was the widow of Roy Chapman Andrews, the expedition leader of the group that discovered the eggs. Others of these eggs are at the American Museum of Natural History, and I'm not totally sure how he got some in his personal possession? I've actually got the book he wrote about this expedition, as well as some other books about him, on hold for me at the local university library, so I'm sure I'll know soon!

2010, taking the skin off a model T-rex so we can see its guts

Another long-time museum artifact that the kids don't remember--but I do!!!--is Wenuhotep, the mummy that the Children's Museum had on display from 1959 until the Art Institute of Chicago demanded it back in 2007. I remember there being some hard feelings about that return, because the museum had actually been permanently given the mummy by the Oriental Institute in Chicago, and they didn't know that the institute had only, itself, been borrowing that mummy from the Art Institute and therefore didn't have permission to give it away?!? So it was bittersweet to be reading about that titular mummy in this Children's Museum history, seeing how they built it a special exhibit when they remodeled and had it X-rayed so they could offer a more nuanced depiction of it to their visitors.

2011, during a homeschool class about Ancient Egypt

The kids and I did see Wenuhotep on exhibit a few years later at the Art Institute of Chicago, and it looks like in 2014 they did do some interesting studies of it, but it's been off exhibit there for quite a while. 

2013, in the Ancient Egypt exhibit (there's now a model mummy that kids can interact with)

It sure as heck wouldn't be off exhibit at the Children's Museum, is all I'm saying...

As happens with all the best deep dives, I now have a huge stack of books on adjacent topics to deep dive into--the Gobi Desert dinosaur finds! The ethics of displaying mummies in museums!--and a list of exceedingly tedious questions to ask the next time the kids and I volunteer at the museum--"Say, you wouldn't happen to have that 1920s model of the scene from Goldilocks and the Three Bears that your first museum curator made out of trash because the museum had so few exhibits handy for me to look at, would you? Um, and maybe can I also see the original museum logo, the giant wooden seahorse, that Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s dad commissioned? And maybe that arrowhead that was plucked from the corpse of a pioneer child, too?"

Here's to continuing to hide from all of my problems snugged up safely in the womb of academe!