Science

Austin and Samara are studying Astronomy this year.  I just love the Apologia Exploring Creation series.  In the past two years we've done Botany and Anatomy.  I’m enjoying the idea of focusing on one topic for the entire year.  It’s a detailed study and we learn so much.  The hands on activities are fun and simple and really bring the point home.  And they’re a nice break as we go along in the book. 

The kids’ favourite activity so far was when we were working on Unit 2 – the Sun.  It involved chocolate so Denver and Victoria also joined us for this one!  We talked about how hot and bright the sun is and how we can bend the rays of light with a magnifying glass to focus the light on a specific spot.  To show the kids how this works, we took a piece of chocolate on a plate and went outside with a magnifying glass.  Thankfully it was a nice sunny day so the experiment worked great.  The kids took their magnifying glass and place it so that the rays of the sun shone right through it, concentrating the energy of the sun's light onto a specific spot on the chocolate.  

  

 

In no time the chocolate had melted . . . in fact, Austin even burnt his!

 

Austin took it one step further and burned a hole through a leaf.  Fun stuff for a nine-year-old boy!  Don't worry, I made him promise he would never do this without supervision.  LOL!  

Victoria is also doing science this year from the Apologia series but hers is the jr. high General Science.  

She wasn't too overly excited to start it but now that she's into it, I think it's better than she thought it would be.  She's also done a few experiments and her favourite one was about density.  She had to pour equal amounts of vegetable oil, water and corn syrup into a glass - in that order. 

The corn syrup ended up at the bottom, the water on top of that and the oil at the very top.

She then gently dropped in a grape, an ice cube, a rock and a piece of cork.  It was pretty cool to see the liquids all separate and to see where each item settled to and stayed. The rock dropped right to the bottom, the grape floated on top of the corn syrup, the ice cube floated on top of the water and the cork floated on top of the vegetable oil.  

Again, it was another simple activity that made the lesson that much more interesting and memorable.  

Thank you Apologia for great curriculum written from a Christian perspective!