Satori Smiles

I’m joining the “Yes! We Did Science!” Friday bloggers, as an incentive for everyone to do science more. To see other homeschoolers blogging about their Science Friday, click the image below.

We actually started this on Tuesday of this week to learn about the respiratory system. Using R.E.A.L. Science Odyssey, we did a Lab Activity where we measured Satori’s breath after different activities, just like we did when we learned about the circulatory system.

We read a few books on respiration.

Satori filled out her breathing chart.

We compared it to our Circulatory Chart where we did the same activities. I now see I should’ve used the same colors, but you can see they aligned up for the most part.

Today (Friday) we did the second RSO Lab on respiration was to make a 10-foot Giant with four major parts: Nose to inhale/exhale, lungs, heart, and a foot for walking.

David was the Giant who inhaled and exhaled. Satori acted as a little red blood cell. She moved the red counters (oxygen) around, through the nose as Daddy inhaled, down the trachea, to the lung, to the heart, down to the foot, dropped off the red blood cell, picked up a blue disc (carbon dioxide), went back up to the heart, and to the lungs. Then the Giant exhaled, so the blue carbon dioxide went up the trachea tube, and out the nose. We did this cycle five times, so Satori got a great workout!

That was just a warmup!

Earlier today I ran across a free download on Ellen McHenry’s Basement Workshop page called the Circulation Game. The target age group is 8-14, but I knew Satori and our whole family would have fun with it. It took maybe an hour to print off on cardstock, tape the back together, color it with markers, make the spinner, and all the other little game pieces. Here it is all finished and on the floor! (You can click the image to see it larger.)

It combines many body systems – circulatory, respiration, digestive and even skeletal systems, and demonstrates how they all work together. Here is the game setup before we started, the Sugar & Protein (food) is in the intestines, and CO2 and waste are in the hands, feet, and head.

Satori and David were Team Orange and I was Team Green. Satori took a spin on our spinner. This was printed on cardstock, colored, laminated, and the arrow was fastened with a brad. It spun perfectly!

The number you land on specifies a move through the circulatory system, and with a 20 you can get pretty far. To generate your red blood cells, you start from your femur bone, as your bone marrow produces blood cells. From there, your red blood cell marker can go up to the lungs to pick up oxygen (O2), then off to either the feet/hands/head to drop off oxygen and pick up CO2, and then back to the lungs to drop off the CO2. You could also select a Sugar&Protein to travel to the feet/hands/head, drop off, pick up Waste, and then travel all the way to the Kidneys. All this time, you have to follow the arrows through your arteries and veins, making a fun twist through the heart’s aorta artery and Vena Cava vein.

The game was amazingly fun for the family! David and Satori won, by just a little. They got all the oxygen and food to the right places, and all the CO2 and Waste to the right places first. Here is how the game looked once we were all done.

Our RSO science lab this week was to make blood! Ask someone what blood looks like, and they’ll probably say a red liquid. But blood is made of different components, and this activity shows us the main components of blood. Below we have everything measured and prepared. Our light corn syrup will be our plasma (1/2 c), the red hot candy the red blood cells (1/2 c), dry lima beans the white blood cells (5 pieces), and the dry lentils as the platelets (1 T).

Red Hot Candies were very hard to find, so I settled for generic hot cinnamon candies I found in Target’s bulk candy section. Of course we had to get a few jellybeans while we were at it, we rarely eat candy, so this was kinda fun.

Pouring the Plasma!

After mixing it all up, our final blood mix! All those red blood cells are what makes our blood look so red.

Topside view.

Satori knew about blood already because she’s fascinated with the human body, but this was helpful for her to also remember what roles plasma and platelets perform in the blood. She colored and labeled this diagram.

After the activity, she also drew her own blood model, and she remembered to include all the parts.

Over the weekend the entire family did our science lessons from R.E.A.L. Science Odyssey – Life. Continuing on with our Human Body lessons, the first activity was learning about our muscles. Using the included cutouts, we made our own arm with muscles that demonstrated how muscles work. We learned that muscles shorten (contract) in order to move. Muscles don’t push your bones, they only shorten and pull.

Also included are the RSO lab sheets, where Satori wrote down the measurements. Here’s she’s using her newest pencil grip that she seems to enjoy using (so far).

We plan to combine a bunch of science labs together, so we can do them with Daddy (he needs to learn science too)! So our next lesson was about our heart. Satori and David did 5 different physical activities and then we took their heart rate. Activities ran from just sitting, walking, situps and pushups, jumping jacks, and running around the house.

We used a real stethoscope that I think I got from Lakeshore Learning for a few dollars (although I can’t find it on their website). Be careful with these things, they really work! I only let Satori use them with careful supervision and had to warn Daddy not to yell when someone had them on.

Here’s Satori’s graph she colored in of our various activities. As expected, sitting had the lowest heart rate per minute, and running had the highest. Activities that the body was mostly laying down (or that Satori didn’t do properly and only gave a half-effort), were not as high as jumping jacks that used the arms.

Satori just can’t get enough of learning about the human body. She watches videos that are probably meant for children much older than her, and every night makes me read from detailed books. When she wants to learn about something, she typically ends up learning more than David and myself.

She just loves to draw and write about it. These are just samples. I’ve spared you all her illustrations of the human body sitting on a toilet with urine (uren) coming out.

You know you drink water but where it goes is first the kidneys. They get the waste that you don’t need and then it goes to your urethras, then your bladder. All of this is behind your intestines. And your kidneys have little tubes that gets the waste out. And also kidneys are the size of a bean. And the bladder looks like a white bag.

I got her some journals and she’s already filled out a dozen pages about different systems of the human body.

I do not ask her to do any of this!

I am now looking into notebooking as a homeschool tool for her.

This is what happens when I left Satori alone to do her science lesson to pack for our trip.

It all started off proper enough…

But I came back to this skeleton who thinks he can dance! Satori always makes me laugh, I don’t know how she thinks of these things.

At least she did everything I told her to do though.

Satori begged to do another science lesson again today, so I figured this one would be a fun Sunday project. This is still from the second lesson “The Cell”. I prepared lemon jello and poured it into two different dishes – one round and one square. After an hour in the fridge, just enough to get them set a bit, I had Daddy re-read the lesson story while I prepared some fruit.

We held our breath when Daddy asked Satori which jello dish might be the plant cell. And she responded correctly, of course the square dish! The circular dish will be the animal cell.

We cut some green grapes in half to represent football-shaped chloroplasts and Satori slipped them into the cell membrane and into the cell.

Each cell got a big strawberry nucleus. Then we labeled the cell parts. Of course our animal cell didn’t get any chloroplasts. These are very simple cells and we could have made them a bit more intricate, but this sufficed for our 5 year old daughter. Besides it’s all the project called for anyway.

MMMm… don’t our cells look yummy?

Aren’t edible science projects great?

Right after this lesson, as I was uploading the photos to my computer, Satori rushed into my office and handed me this paper.

I love Science. (followed by a huge number)

We love our new science program R.E.A.L. Science Odyssey! The topics in Level One Life cover:

• What is Life?
• The Cell
• The Human Body
• Classifying Life
• Animal Kingdom
• Plant Kingdom

We just covered the human body as a unit study, so we might do some Animal Kingdom topics this summer yet. I especially think it would be great to do when we visit my parent’s Wisconsin farm, where it would be easier to find earthworms and snails.

We actually did this lesson last night right after our “What is Life” lesson, but my posts are so full of photos, I like to break things up a bit.

I love learning along with my daughter, and this lesson was no exception! We learned about cells, parts of a cell, and the difference between animal and plant cells. For our lab activity, we used a chicken egg. Since I’m on-off vegan, I had to get eggs from the store for this, but at least they were cage-free, organic, high Omega-3 eggs. In this picture you might even be able to see the tiny holes egg shells have to let air and water in (click image).

Satori filled out the lab worksheet on parts of the egg as we carefully examined our own egg.

The entire family learned more about the egg. David used to think the yellow-orange yolk was the baby chicken itself, which might explain why he doesn’t like to eat eggs, being we are vegetarian. But the yolk is the food for the embryo before it is hatched. We learned what all those funny little parts are that are attached to the yolk (chalaza). We saw the blastodisc inside the yolk. Satori knows a tiny bit about eggs from our quick unit study on the human body and she kept wanting to draw a sperm entering this egg. That entry point would be the blastodisc.

Anyway, the yolk and blastodisc is one entire single cell that we can see without an expensive microscope!

Satori completed her worksheet, labeled the major parts of the egg and colored it in.

Here’s more helpful resources on learning about Eggs!

Enchanted Learning – Egg and Embryo Development

Interactive Cell Model for Animal and Plant Cells

Plant and Animal Cell Worksheets

Yesterday we pulled out our R.E.A.L. Science Odyssey – Life program (RSO) and did the first two lessons. Up until now we’ve struggled with trying to use Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding (BFSU). But after discovering recently that BFSU won’t be covering evolution in their next level, I decided it was time to put it on the shelf and try to do a science program that was easier to follow. I had actually purchased RSO a year ago, as it looked great – specifically built for homeschoolers and followed the WTM classical style of three cycles of Life, Earth/Space, Chemistry and Physics. I looked through it again and printed it all out and put in a 1.5″ Staples Better Binder.

I could not believe how easy-to-implement and how well put together this program is! I felt rather spoiled. In the front of the book, is lists of perishable and non-perishable items you’ll need in order of lessons. Book suggestions and web links. Each lesson starts out as a read-aloud story which isn’t hesitant to include a few complex science vocabulary words. Then there’s at least one lab activity all neatly laid out for you, including worksheets you might need. The activities look so much fun! I was drooling over it all and then I purchased the next two years – Earth & Space and Chemistry. They look just as much fun and I know Satori is going to love this.

In fact, this program is so well put together that I could hand the RSO binder to David and have him teach an entire lesson right off the bat! I could never do that with BFSU, that always required a 30-minute reading and gathering prep for the parent.

After reading the intro story on “What is L ife?” and doing the first worksheet, we headed out in the wilderness to do a plot study. This fox watched us, he was doing some really loud and scary screaming that we had to double-check it wasn’t a mountain lion before we entered the forest!

Armed with a magnifying glass.

David was doubtful we’d find any “life” in our high altitude desert forest, but that’s pretty much all we found. The only non-living things we found was rocks, soil, and a scrap of tinfoil. Our first rock Satori overturned had a nest of ants with tons of larvae. By the time we got the camera from the house, the busy ant workers had whisked most of the larvae into safer passages.

Here’s a view of our house we don’t usually see.

We’re really looking forward to doing more RSO lessons. In fact, you may see a slurry of RSO posts in the next few days, we are going on another 12-day vacation next week so we want to get as much in as we can before we head to my parent’s Wisconsin farm. Here’s a few more views of the program, although you can download an extensive “Try Before You Buy” off the Pandia Press website!

The read-aloud story for “Living Things Are Made of Cells” (lesson covered in next post)!

A sample lab worksheet, see how easy they lay it all out for you?

View of the front cover.

Speaking of the human body, I’ll share a few other resources we’ve used in our little unit study foray.

After a very healthy spring with Mom constantly talking about eating right and exercising, Satori decided she wanted to learn about the human body and become a doctor. So for a month we learned about human anatomy by reading this First Encyclopedia of the Human Body, a very gentle introduction for a young one.

Off Netflix (not Instant) we watched National Geographic’s Inside the Living Body. Satori couldn’t get enough of it, she watched it four times before I sent it back. She said she wanted to watch it  until she had it all memorized. Last time she did this was when we studied prehistory and she watched Walking With Monsters a dozen times.

As a finale, we saw Body Worlds at the Denver Nature & Science Museum. Of course photography wasn’t allowed inside the exhibit so I don’t have photos of this field trip.

This was simply an introduction to the human body, but Satori really was interested and retained so much. She’ll bring up things she’s learned in everyday conversation everyday now. I can’t wait to go into more detail and study anatomy again.

The Smart Lab You Explore It Human Body has been a cool homeschool investment. It comes with a body model that you can explore with the included plastic tweezers and forceps. Lots of fun squishy organs, skeleton and muscle examples, and a clear “skin”. There are already very thorough Amazon reviews, so I won’t go in that much detail, just wanted to share a few photos.

You then place the organs and parts on the Organizer sheet.

As you’re doing all this, you’re following a pizza slice going through the human body and hitting all the major systems. Step by step they guide you where the pizza is and which systems are processing it.

It was really a great educational toy!

And then it helps you reassemble your body. Here he is with his organs back in the body.