Tales of Homeschool

We spent first half of the class making our posters proclaiming that we are "3rd-5th" "SCIENCE" "CLASS".  Thre...

What can we explore that takes only one hour?  Because that's about all the time we have left for this school year. Aha,  Bernoulli ef...

Density, part 2 We once again headed down to the kitchen to work on our investigations with density, using the activities from chapter ...

Density, part 1 I think the activities in  Inquiry in Action  for this subject are great, but absolutely dreaded carrying them out in a ca...

Week 25 ended up not happening as a science class -- a couple of people wanted to test a 4th and 5th grade VBS curriculum they were writing,...

Inquiry in Action  chapter 5, part 2 -- Formation of a precipitate, and neutralizing acids and bases. We started out with a review of what...

Inquiry in Action  Chapter 5, Chemical Change. Wow, I was SO EXCITED about this week's lesson. We started off by discussing the diff...

Inquiry in Action  Chapter 4 part 2 -- Dissolving gases. Exciting thing number 1 for this week -- both my adult helpers let me know at the...

Inquiry in Action  chapter 4 -- Dissolving Solids and Liquids (we'll get to gases next week) Activity 1 is to simply dissolve sugar an...

Continuing Chapter 3 of  Inquiry in Action This week we tried Using Color to See How Liquids Combine, and Using the Combining Test to Iden...

Chapter 3 of  Inquiry in Action We started class by taking a look at the polarity of water.  I had them tell me the chemical formula (H2O)...

Chapter 2 of  ACS Inquiry in Action This week we tried to identify a mystery crystal. We started off by giving the students 4 knowns:  s...

Oh, how proud and excited I was to have a curriculum all laid out for the next several weeks!  I started working through the next lesson sev...

Back to co-op after Christmas, ready to start our second semester.  This semester we'll be focusing more on Chemistry. And we've a...

Oops!  I thought I'd get around to writing these up over Christmas break, but I was too busy Christmassing.  And, alas, I seem to not ha...

Continuation of light and optics. We started off by playing with a set of spinning top optical illusions I'd found at Hobby Lobby.  It...

This week was our Fall Open House, so we spent much of our class time getting ready for that.  We stapled covers on our booklets of Newton...

Science class met on Halloween this week, so I invited the kids to bring in magic tricks to demonstrate to their classmates.  It was fun, al...

Magnets! I spent some time talking about whys of magnets -- why do magnets act the way they do (electrons), why can we magnetize certain m...

Friction. Actually, we started out with a review of gravity from last week.  I used some questions from Science Jim's  Bite-Size Physi...