The Five Senses

Yesterday we tested Madeline's five senses to see how keen they are.  I set up ten stations, two for each sense.  Stations 1 & 2 were set up as 'touch' with a cotton ball in one brown bag and a screw in the other.  Madeline had to reach into the bag and guess the item without looking.  Stations 3 & 4 were 'sight' and I used an orange on a plate and some vinegar in a glass jar.  The next stations, 5 & 6, were 'smell'.  Again, I used vinegar and also some minced garlic.  I kept a washcloth on top so she couldn't see what the items were.  Does it make me an evil mom that I really enjoyed her reaction to the garlic?  hehe.  Next, there were another two brown bags set up for 'hearing' for stations 7 & 8, one containing a set of keys and the other some coins.  The last stations, 9 & 10, were 'taste'.  I understand her reluctance for me placing something in her mouth with her eyes closed after the good laugh I had when she smelled the garlic.  I assured her they were things she liked.  Station 9 was a piece of cantaloupe, and station 10 was some craisins, which apparently she no longer likes.











After making her rounds, I'd say she's pretty in tune with her senses. 8 out of 10. She got all correct except for station 4 being the vinegar in the jar for 'sight'.  She obviously guessed it to be water.  She also thought station 8 had another set of keys instead of the coins.

She filled out a lab sheet guessing which items were in each station and also stating which other sense she'd like to use instead of the sense given.  She answered that she would like to use her sense of sight most often, followed by her sense of taste.

We also read a few extra books about the five senses.  We had 2 books at home about Helen Keller and read through those as well.  I'm always amazed at what Helen Keller had accomplished in her life.  Things could have been *oh*so*different* for her without determination!

Digestive Stuff - Part 2

Our second lab of the Digestive unit showed the length of a child's digestive tract -- 21 feet!  We had a piece of yarn 21' long, then stapled index cards labeled with the distance along the tract.  We labeled the mouth at 3" from the beginning, the esophagus 10" from the mouth, the stomach 6" from the esophagus, the small intestine 15' from the stomach, and finally the large intestine 4' from the small intestine.  We spread it out from one end of the room to the other... actually, the digestive tract was longer than the length of the room and we had to coil the small intestine a bit to make it all fit.  This activity really showed Madeline the true length and she was amazed that her digestive tract was so long and coiled up inside her little body.  I tried to get a photo of the entire thing, but it was near impossible.  Here is the beginning of the digestive tract, just to show you what I mean.  Super simple, yet very effective. 

Last summer, we found this cool anatomy apron while perusing garage sales. I just love going to yard sales of home schoolers and teachers! The organs are held on with velcro and the kidneys are on the backside.  Madeline likes to play with this every now and again, but was even more excited now that we were discussing some of these organs.

We finished off the digestive unit with a snack and Madeline proudly exclaimed that her trail mix will be in her stomach for the next 3 hours getting squeezed and mashed up into a liquid form!

I'm a red blood cell

Recently, Maddie was a red blood cell carrying oxygen through a giant's body.  You didn't know that?  It's true.  She started the journey in the giant's heart, then traveled to the lungs to pick up some oxygen, and back to the heart.  Since this giant was walking, she needed to carry the oxygen all the way down to the giant's foot, where she then traded the oxygen for carbon dioxide, a waste product.  The carbon dioxide then needed to travel to the heart so it can be sent to the lungs.  Once the carbon dioxide was in the lungs, the giant exhaled, sending it out of the body.  Then, she was able to pick up more oxygen and repeat the process. 

There were four pieces of paper and a cardboard tube spread out on the floor for this activity.  Each paper had either a nose, lung, heart, or foot drawn on, and the tube was the trachea.   In the picture above, she had just carried the oxygen to the foot and exchanged it for carbon dioxide.  In the picture below, the oxygen is traveling down the trachea to get to the lungs.

She originally had 5 oxygen (red) and 5 carbon dioxide (blue) cubes to work with, and she did a couple rounds of this.  About a week after we did this activity, she impressed me by remembering how to pronounce carbon dioxide, what it is, and talked about it in the correct context without any help.

Volcanic activity in the kitchen

"Don't step on the red.... it's lava!" is a typical statement heard around our house lately, especially with all of our water and land form discussion in geography.  I figure what perfect timing to make our own volcano.  It was really easy and the kids thought it was super fun. Travis even woke up in the middle of the night last night asking to make another volcano.

Recipe:
In one cup (the volcano cup), add 1/3 cup water; 2 tsp baking soda; 2 tsp liquid dish soap (add more for extra foam)
In another cup, add 5 T vinegar and a few drops of red food coloring (optional).
Pour vinegar into volcano cup quickly.

Great teamwork adding the ingredients.

Action is about to happen..... wait for it.....

Travis doesn't look too impressed, but don't let that fool you.  

"I'm gonna touch it...."

 

All in all, this was a quick and fun experiment.  This will probably be something we'll do randomly when the kids need a distraction.

Digestive stuff

Today Maddie told me that she'd like to do more science stuff, so more science stuff we'll do.  We're still working on the human body and the focus at the moment is the digestive system.  We read a couple books from the library and did the experiments that were in the books.

Since digestion begins in the mouth as you break up food with your teeth, our first experiment involved chewing food and spitting it out to examine it.  Madeline first chewed a bite of carrot 10 times, then spit it out.  The next piece of carrot was chewed up around 30 times... it was hard to count since she was giggling so much.  Lovely photo though, no?  Even though this was supposed to show that the longer you chew food, the smaller the pieces will be,  we didn't really notice a whole big difference.  Could be that the first carrot stick was cut in half and the next was a whole one.  Who knows.


The next thing we did was collect little bits of food that could typically be eaten for lunch or as a snack.  We grabbed the leftover crust from a pb+honey sandwich, some noodles from last nights dinner, a piece of watermelon, cantaloupe, and two cherry tomatoes. We also needed a little bit of milk to wash it all down.  Madeline added all of the ingredients into a ziploc bag and then squeezed it all together to symbolize the stomach mashing up food to turn it into a liquid mixture.  She really liked this and also thought it was a little bit gross.

Here she is adding the ingredients:

..... and mashing it all up.

These are the books we read.  I really like the Paul Showers books and we usually end up doing the experiments that they suggest.

Tomorrow we will add some digestive materials to our skeleton and do the labs included in RSO.