Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Human Body ~ Week 1

Well everyone, I am happy to announce we are starting a new Co-Op unit study on the Human Body! Julie has so very kindly organized what is sure to be an epic unit! I cant wait to post all the cool stuff we are going to do! Last week we kicked it off with an introduction of the human Body! Julie had a short bible verse about the creation of Man to help us all remember that we are made like God and our bodies are special and deserves to be taken care of. Then we watched The Magic School Bus Inside the Human Body . I love it when a well placed movie can teach as much as a book! This was one of those movies. There was so much information and it helps so much to put an image to something that we cant see so when we talk about it it makes it easier to understand! The movie was long, but everyone enjoyed it!


After the movie we all headed down stairs to trace the outlines of our bodies. These are going to be used during the rest of the unit to help us map our insides! I cant wait to see how they turn out and what we learn! We had the kids be in groups of two so that there weren't as many people! Since everyone has more then one kid in their family, not everyone needed one per person! ;) It was fun to watch them work together to trace the bodies! There was a ton of giggles and laughter as they figured out how to make feet and heads without getting marker all over! Here is what they looked like!









Well we are all set and ready to go! Starting next Tuesday we will be learning about the skin! Get ready for more posts! Happy Schooling!




Magnets, Magenets, Magnets!!!!

Well I have been rather behind in posting what we have been up to lately. :( Sorry about that! A couple of weeks ago we had a science day where we leaned about magnets! Who doesn't want to learn about magnets? They are fun, they stick to stuff and each other, there are a million awesome experiments you can do with them, and you can call it school work! :) Nothing better then that! We started the day off by watching the How Its Made episode about magnets! It was really fun to see all the stuff that they put into magnets to make them and how hot they get (that my friends is a dirty job!). After we finished the movie, it was off to explore! We talked about what things were magnetic, we talked about natural magnetic rocks, we talked about magnet poles, magnetic fields, attraction, and repelling, we even did a bunch of magnetic exploration! Even the littlest ones got a chance to get in on the action! ;) Here are some pictures of what we did!
Watching How Its Made!


Is it magnetic or non magnetic?

North and South Poles

Magnets with different shapes

Magnetic Rocks!

This was an awesome work sheet that demonstrated attraction and repelling of magnets. The child would put the magnet pole together and observe the results. For example, North and North, or South and North, or South and South. This helped them see that opposite poles attract and like pole repel!


Here is the discussion on magnetic fields.


Here we used different magnets and different poles near each other. Then we would sprinkle iron filings on the top of them to observe the different shapes a magnetic field could take.

Opposite poles.

Same poles.

Horse shoe shaped magnet

Square magnet


Circular magnet




Here was a graphing activity for the younger kids.

And lots of free exploration!



This experiment was for the older kids. Here they were looking at the strength of the magnetic force and charting their results using different magnets.




The littlest kiddos had a great time fishing with a magnet for anything that would stick! ;)

It was a great day that I think really taught alot in a short amount of time! plus it was alot of fun! :) I know that I was able to use this day as a jumping off point for our discussion of how a compass works! Happy Schooling Everyone!!!