Human Body

Last night we watched Inside the Living Body and Incredible Human Machine on the National Geographic Channel. Georgia saw a commercial for it earlier in the week, so we made sure to remember to check it out. And we are glad we did!

Inside the Living Body took us on a journey from birth through old age. We learned the changes that occur at each stage in life. It was incredible!

You can learn more about the show, about the human body, and watch some clips here: http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/inside-living-body/index.html

You can also check the schedule for when it airs again.

Incredible Human Machine was also fascinating. You can check it out here: http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/incredible-human-machine/index.html

And they have the Incredible Human Machine game that we have played before. The girls did that again today.

They played other anatomy games as well. Some of them can be found here:

• http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/body/index_interactivebody.shtml


• http://www.bbc.co.uk/northernireland/schools/4_11/tykids/flash/bodyparts.html


• http://science.nationalgeographic.com/science/health-and-human-body/human-body/


• http://www.kidshealth.org/misc_pages/mybody_SW.html


• http://www.harcourtschool.com/activity/bodyintro_34/

They built a skeleton, put organs and muscles in their correct spots, answered questions, reviewed the senses, and had lots of fun!

And might I suggest taking the Senses Challenge!? http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/body/interactives/senseschallenge/

(By the way, this is our one-hundredth post!)

Winter Bird Hunt

Today was a beautiful day, perfect for taking a nice hike through the woods at the Shawnee Prairie Preserve. The sky was blue and clear, the sun was shining bright, and the birds were aflutter. We brought along our camera and binoculars and had fun trying to spot some birds, though bird watching with kids is not the easiest thing to do. Being in nature we are surrounded by so many fascinating things, it's hard to be quiet! We did find a lot of neat things, such as lichen and moss, fungi and onion grass, animal tracks and tree burls.

Some of the birds we saw were Carolina Chickadees, Canada Geese, Cooper's Hawks, American Tree Sparrows, and a Great Blue Heron juvenile. We used Georgia's Birds of Ohio field guide book to identify the birds. She bought this book with some of her Christmas money at the Nature Center's gift shop.

Finding the Great Blue Heron was such a treat. We tried to follow it slowly and quietly. We said we felt like we were on National Geographic!

Below are the pictures we took today. We hope you enjoy them!

E-mail from an author

When we checked our blog e-mail we found a letter for Georgia from an author of one of the books she read! How exciting! She told her that the horse that inspired the story lives in Hawaii, and she thought it was neat that we were studying Hawaii at the same time. (She found our blog because we mentioned her book.)

How cool is that!

Now Georgia will need to work on writing a reply.

New Postcards, New Books

We've been exchanging postcards with other homeschool kids accross the country.

http://canterburyacademynews.blogspot.com/2008/01/postcard-kids.html

Here the girls are showing off the postcards they've received so far.

We've had fun learning about the places they came from.

Here's Olivia with her new books. She has a couple Pony Pal books of her own, duplicates from Georgia's collection. And her Amelia Bedelia books have the girls giggling with all the funny things Amelia Bedelia does.

And Georgia received some more Pony Pal books. She's only missing three from the series.

And here are some for the girls to share.

We purchased the books in lots from eBay. Much more affordable that way! Georgia was all excited for her Pony Pals. she kept asking me to check on the auction to see if we were still winning!

Ice, Salt, Water, & Temperature

Earlier this week I made some soup for supper. The girls wanted to put an ice cube in their bowl to help the soup cool faster. Of course this led to some fun. The girls did a little "experiment" to see what salt and pepper would do to an ice cube.

They left one cube clean, added salt to the cube on the right, and pepper to the cube on the left. It was pretty amazing to see how fast the salt made a hole in the ice cube. The pepper didn't make that much of a difference. We thought, if it did increase the melting speed it would probably be due to the color, since darker colors absorb more light/heat. The same reason dirty snow melts quicker than clean snow.

We learned that salt water has a lower freezing point than fresh water. Adding the salt lowered the freezing point, which melted the ice cube faster than the ice cube without the salt.

The girls also had fun playing with different states of water here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/ks2bitesize/science/activities/changing_state.shtml

It's a British site, so it uses Celsius instead of Fahrenheit.

This one was fun, too: http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/ks2bitesize/science/activities/gases.shtml

Yeast

The girls have been helping me make bread. Today it was Olivia's turn to help.

When making the bread, the girls and I talked a bit about the ingredients and where they came from. The girls think yeast is pretty amazing.

Here we read a bit about the history of yeast: http://www.breadworld.com/Science.aspx

And here we found some neat yeast experiments to try: http://www.lesaffreyeastcorp.com/SoY/students.html

And here's instructions on how to make a yeast-air balloon: http://www.exploratorium.edu/cooking/bread/activity-yeast.html

We'll have to try some of them!!